Transparency Intnl.

I was at the at official launch of the Global Corruption Report 2007: Corruption and the Judicial Systems by Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam, President, Transparency International Malaysia on Thursday evening, 4pm at the Bar Council Auditorium, Kuala Lumpur.

A panel discussion and dialogue was held after and here is The Star's take of the event.

At the dialogue I raised three significant observations regarding a global perception survey and corruption in the judicial systems for the panel members attention.

1. It was only a perception survey and it could be world's apart from reality on the ground. You cannot possibly say or answer your survey by hearsay and inference in a survey like this. It depends on who your respondents are and how valid the selection was. And based on perception, we cannot take a stand against any individual or body. It is only a general, respondents view and nothing more.

2. A global comparision and ranking would not be valid because the respondents in different countries are different and based on their value systems, perceptional differences and standards, their scaling would be different. Hence a comparision would not be correct. To be very scientific, it should be the same respondents looking at the various judicial systems. This is practically not possible because everyone lives in their own country and does not know about the workings in other countries.

3. How do you distinguish an unfair or bad decision of a judge as opposed to to a corrupt one i.e. where a particular decision was arrived at by paying money to a judge. Because no corrupt judge would say he received payment or no person seeking a favoured judgement is going to say he paid money for that decision. Is there a link man between the two and if so can he be caught red handed to prove corruption had taken place?