Description
Since the late 1990s, corruption has become a buzzword in public and policy discourse towards developing countries. Since the emergence of the discourse, corruption has been portrayed as a hurdle for appropriately and/or even fairly allocating resources for international development. In the last decade, corruption has been increasingly featured as a human rights issue. This paper investigates the conflation of corruption and human rights in the EU. Over the past few years, the EU has started adopting a human rights-based approach to corruption for both member-states and third countries. Yet, the cultural insensitivity and ideological framing of the current approach augment problems in development and democratisation policies. The inadequate understanding of corruption makes it harder to promote development/democracy because it does not fully grasp the complexity of the phenomenon. Hence, the aim of this paper is twofold: i) to explore the ideological and political underpinnings in the understanding of corruption as a human rights issue; and ii) to explore the impact of such approach in policymaking in relation to development and democracy.
