On August 31 we have launched a new MOOC course, this time on transparency and anticorruption. Bribery is the form of corruption most commonly associated with this scourge. Actually, if we think about an image to illustrate corruption, the one that comes immediately to mind is that of a hand passing an envelope stuffed with […]
For the last 25 Chile has been ruled by freely elected civilian government, following 17 years of military dictatorship. With respect to the human rights violations committed by the dictatorship measures of truth-telling, memory preservation, acknowledgment, reparations, and criminal justice have been implemented. Progress has been gradual and without drawbacks. Yet, there have been periods […]
Since the beginning of the 90s the topic of anticorruption has gained prominence in the agenda of public ethics in different countries. In this year 2015 there have been a number of corruption scandals involving governmental officers and/or businessmen in several parts of the world, including Brazil, the Latin American giant, and Chile, a country […]
Recent cable news highlight, once more, the existing sharp contrast between Western human and the frustrations of the Arab world whose most extreme manifestation is the terrorism practiced by the so-called Islamic State as a means for its expansionist politics. The news are that the Islamic State has achieved control of a good part of […]
An abundant academic literature has been produced in the last two or three decades on the topic of societies of trust . This is very relevant today given that trust in public institutions has markedly declined in the Americas and elsewhere, according to several opinion polls. The different authors who have written on this topic […]
The expression State capture was coined by the World Bank experts Daniel Kauffmann y Joel Hellman some 15 years ago. These authors alluded to the relationship between corporations and the State. They distinguished three modalities : a) administrative corruption, that is the payment by corporations to published servants so that they do not apply the […]
Recent high-profile attacks have put a new note of urgency on the combat of terrorism. They include a parade of horrific executions of hostages carried out by ISIS, recorded and uploaded in the social networks; the massacre of the journalists of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and the mysterious death of the Argentinian prosecutor who investigated […]
The horrible massacre of the editors of Charlie Hebdo forces us to recall the nature of the freedom of speech. This freedom has been named ‘the queen of liberties’. Its roots can be traced back to the time of the Enlightenment, during which the modern notions of democracy and human rights were born. Opinions that […]
On December 2, 1949, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, which entered into force two years later. For this reason this December day has been established as the international day of the abolition of […]
The origin of the modern concept of citizen may be traced back to the late 18th century. At that time the philosophical propositions of the Enlightenment materialized in the independence of the United States of America and in the French Revolution. Those philosophical propositions changed the concept of sovereignty. Up until then sovereignty was thought […]