How to Make International Law More Effective: the Effectiveness of the United Nations Convention against Corruption

This paper deals with how to make international law more de facto effective. There are countless conventions on topics such as human rights, environmental law, or, in our case, corruption prevention. The central thesis is that lawyers and policymakers can make existing treaties more effective using a multidisciplinary approach. It consists of the empirical studies of other science fields, including behavioural economics, sociology, and criminology. This approach is compatible with international law, specifically with the rules of interpretation laid out in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (hereinafter — VCLT), through an evolutionary interpretation. An effective anticorruption policy needs to be tailor-made for the specific country’s condition. The assumption that a successful approach in one state in one specific situation will necessarily be successful in another is flawed. This paper presents different policy concepts to curb corruption: rational choice, self-concept maintenance, principal-agent theory, and collective action problem. The concepts are evaluated through the lens of empirical studies. To exemplify this approach an application of the criterion “culture” will be shown. G. Hofstede discovered in his research different cultural dimensions: power distance, individualism, masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance. Each dimension has a unique interaction with corruption. These interactions explain why the same approach does not yield the same result. For example, a state that has a very high-power distance would not benefit as strongly from a principal-agent theory approach. In high-power distance countries the average citizen has little to no influence on the state’s politics. The accountability of principles, however, is one of the key elements of the principal-agent approach. On the contrary such an approach would certainly backfire. Giving principals more money and monitoring powers, as the approach suggests, would only consolidate existing structures. In a state with high accountability (low-power distance) this approach would strengthen the fight against corruption.