Video Cameras to fight corruption!!!

Video Cameras to fight corruption!!!

Back to 2mcctv Video Surveillance

MOSCOW, September 2 (RIA Novosti) - The authors of a new administrative reform to fight corruption have chosen such means as restricting officials' contacts with businessmen outside state institutions and video surveillance. Experts described the initiative as humiliating and hopeless in a respected business daily on Friday.

Vedomosti wrote that the Trade and Economic Development Ministry had prepared the concept of the 2006-2008 reform. Its authors said Russia was situated in the last third of the World Bank's rankings of 209 countries in terms of the main indicators of state governance quality. In 2004, Transparency International, a non-government organization seeking to combat corruption, put Russia in 90th place among 146 countries in its corruption perception index.

Surveys conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Foundation reveal that 71% of Russians are negative about the work of state officials, and 76% have encountered corruption. "The system of state governance has become a factor restricting the country's further successful development and full use of its potential," the new concept said.

There will be no total surveillance, says one of the authors, Mikhail Dmitriyev, head of research at the Center of Strategic Studies, a Moscow-based think tank. This measure is needed when risks are high: in tax and customs bodies, as well as in agencies dealing with state purchases and managing state property.

Arkady Volsky, the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, a business-friendly association, described video surveillance of officials as "absurd" and suggested that now two bribes would be given: one to the official and the other to the observer. A representative of an automobile company said that if officials were unable to visit, for example, plants, they would know little about the industry they regulated.

Alexander Romanov, a representative of the Alcohol Producers Committee, described the initiative as "humiliating for both businessmen and officials," but said he was ready to work in front of cameras if the reform was adopted.

"This is the wrong answer to a real problem," said Miklos Marschall, Transparency International's regional director for Europe and Central Asia. If the measure is adopted, "important decisions will be made outside offices, while performances for the inspectors will be staged in front of cameras," he said.