The State holds the primary responsibility to promote and protect the human rights of citizens and other individuals within its jurisdiction, yet when corruption is prevalent, politicians and public servants often fail to take decisions with the interests of society in mind, causing violations of the State’s obligations under the core UN human rights treaties. Where corruption is systemic, it directly affects the poorest sections of the population, as a result of the diversion and siphoning off of public expenditure budgets. In other words, corruption works in direct tension to, and contradiction with, the right to development, and with the call made throughout the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that ‘no-one [should be] left behind.’

At the very least, corruption compromises a government’s ability to deliver an array of public services, including health, education and welfare – all essential for the realisation of economic, social and cultural rights. In the worst cases, corruption compromises the rights to dignity, security of person, and even the right to life. Moreover, a cursory review of every single situation of serious human rights violations on the UN Human Rights Council’s agenda today, demonstrates that each and every one of those situations is the result, in large part, of corruption and related efforts of governing elites to safeguard their privileged positions.

Yet despite the seriousness of the crime of corruption, and despite the gravity of its consequences for universal human rights, and while States (including in the Human Rights Council) are quick to condemn it; there is a significant disconnect between such protestations and actual action to confront corruption and to hold perpetrators to account. There have been notably few successful prosecutions around the world, under either criminal or civil law, and - equally importantly - there are very few cases where victims have been able to secure remedy and redress.

There are a number of possible reasons for this. One is that corruption is, in a sense, an ‘invisible crime,’ compared to, for example, terrorism. The victims of corruption, however, are not as remote from the wrongdoing as is often assumed. For example, where the diversion of public funds for the purchase of child immunisation kits for preventable diseases ends up in private pockets, children may die as a result; where money earmarked to build schools or pay teachers’ salaries is instead paid into the private bank accounts of public officials, children will not be able to enjoy their right to education; and where kleptocrats tightly control the media, the police and the judiciary, individuals will be deprived of their rights to freedom of speech, liberty and family.

This new policy brief, by URG, Kroll and Angela Barkhouse aims, for the first time, to empirically measure the immediate and serious impacts of corruption on internationally protected human rights. The hope of the authors is that this will help build a case for a serious push by the international community to combat and eliminate corruption, as an essential prerequisite to the full enjoyment of all human rights and the realisation of the SDGs ‘leaving no one behind.’

In order to demonstrate and measure that impact, the brief presents the conclusions of a one-year data analysis project, using Kroll’s proprietary data analysis software, that compares and correlates levels of corruption in 175 different UN member States (as measured by Transparency International’s corruption perception index - CPI) with levels of enjoyment of basic human rights – especially economic, social and cultural rights, and the right to development – in those same countries (as measured by applying and analysing multiple human rights impact indicators, as defined by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights).