Monday, October 22, 2007

BRCKO DISTRICT SUPERVISOR DISCUSSED CORRUPTION ISSUES WITH REPRESENTATIVES OF TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL

BRCKO, Bosnia (October 22,2007) - The Brcko District Supervisor Raffi Gregorian met with Srdjan Blagovcanin, Executive Director, and Ljubinko Lekovic, Legal Advisor in Transparency International in Brcko.

The subject of the meeting was corruption issues and the mandate of the Transparency International in Bosnia. Supervisor Gregorian commended their work, especially the efforts in the project of Civic Advocacy Partnership Program dealing with the problems of corruption and insufficiently transparent and unaccountable government administration, and he expressed hope that some of their future projects would cover Brcko District as well.

Gregorian added that the citizens of the Brcko District are aware of the existence of corruption within their own local authority structures, but are unable to fight against it because the District’s NGO sector hasn’t developed capacities to investigate and address these issues.

However, the establishment of the Auditor’s Office and the Public Attorney Office now provides additional protections for citizens’ interests within the public administration.

“Citizens expect the Supervisor to deal with corruption but the Supervisor can fix only systemic and extremely obvious individual mistakes. That is why I encourage organizations like Transparency International to establish a presence in the District, so that citizens will be able to take things into their own hands long after Supervision is ended, “ Gregorian said.

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