Generally, Corruption has emerged as a major obstacle to the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of migrant smuggling offences. It is also an obstacle to international law enforcement cooperation in the fight against migrant smuggling.
Experience shows that law enforcement, immigration control and border protection activities can effectively be sabotaged and their impact neutralized by corruption. Migrant smuggling, like other forms of organized crime, flourishes where public officials are corrupt. In fact, many migrant smuggling operations would not last long without the steady fuel of corruption in one form or another. Combating corruption is therefore an essential element of any comprehensive and effective strategy to address the problem of migrant smuggling. Corruption often undermines national and international efforts to prevent and control the crime of migrants, just as it affects the response to other forms of transnational crime such as trafficking in persons, in firearms, and in narcotics.
Organized criminal groups make frequent use of the presence of corruption, often together with intimidation and violence, to facilitate their migrant smuggling operations. Migrant smuggling can generate large revenues that smugglers in turn can use to bribe officials and buy their complicity. In a European country, a border guard helped a member of an organized crime group fabricate a false alibi by entering information into the official information system showing that the criminal had left and re-entered the country on certain dates and had been outside the country during a certain period of crime that shows uses corruption. In North America, after a two year investigation triggered by corruption from an informant, a special agent in an immigration enforcement unit was caught abusing her function by illegally accessing and transferring sensitive government documents to family members and associates with strong ties to drug trafficking organizations. Similarly, a junior law enforcement officer was intercepted talking about conducting government database checks on members of a drug trafficking organization.
The resulting investigation revealed that he had regularly been conducting unauthorized government database checks on members of a smuggling organization and providing that information to the organization. In African Corruption is perceived by political and economic commentators such as Harrison (2004), Szeftel (2000b), and Uneke (2010) as being endemic in African countries, and increasingly being blamed for the inadequate economic growth in economies and the extant high socio-economic inequalities and poverty. Several scholars including political commentators such as Riley (2000), Robinson (2004), Mbaku (2007), and Devine (2010) have attempted to examine the factors that produce corruption, and especially why corruption is persistent in Africa. African country, law enforcement officials charged with executing the deportation of irregular migrants, as ordered by a court, accepted bribes in exchange for failing to execute the deportation order.
It is thought likely that their supervisors were also involved. In another country, two border control officers arrested migrants who were being smuggled into the country. Once in custody, two of the migrants who were later revealed to be the smugglers, were released from custody after they paid a substantial bribe to the two officers. In Somalia Since the collapse of Barre’s regime in 1991, governance systems and institutions in Somalia collapsed. The subsequent transitional government institutional framework was too weak to restore the country back to its feet . The scenario left millions of Somalis in the state of anarchy.
Lawlessness and violence was the order of the day. Many lost their lives, considerable figures internal displaced and hundreds of thousands fled their country to be refugees in foreign countries. The world termed it as ‘ failed state’ because it is unable to exercise authority over its territory and provide the most basic services to its people Somalia stands apart. Repeated attempts by the international community to unite Somalia under a viable national government nevertheless failed miserably, largely because of a persistent lack of political consensus in Somalia about the form that a national government should take, and about how to equitably manage the distribution of political power and resources among the country’s fractious clans (Council on Foreign Relations, 2010). With new Federal Government that came to power in September of 2012, Somalia is now rising from the ashes of the civil war. It has shown the world that it is possible to have peaceful, stable, viable and just Somali state. The post-conflict reconstruction of Somalia calls for strong civic dialogue and political reconciliation between communities or clans to settle the past differences and build the future Somalia with sound governance and democratic institutions. United Nations put the cost of corruption succinctly in its Foreword to the 2004 United Nations Convention Against Corruption.
Calling corruption an “ insidious plague that has a wide range of corrosive effects on societies,” he added that it diverts funds intended for development, undermines the ability of governments to provide basic services, feeds inequalities and injustice, and discourages foreign aid investment. These practices have particular repercussions in countries emerging from conflict because monies that are needed for development of, for example, roads, utilities, education, health care, and transportation, are diverted by greed and desire to survive and get ahead in a broken system. Corruption is very widespread and, because of its diverse forms, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to measure. Nathanial Heller, Managing Director at Global Integrity, compares measuring corruption to “ trying to measure a black hole. You can’t measure it because you can’t see it,” he adds.
Global Integrity, therefore, does not measure corruption, but rather assesses its opposite. Somalia depends heavily on foreign assistance until they can get basic security in place, or the institutions of governance up and running. In that sense, peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction has been a “ growth industry” for the international community, which finds itself with the complex task of trying to help rebuild war-torn or failed states.
And, the process can take years. Peacebuilding was conceived in the context of post-conflict recovery efforts to promote reconciliation and reconstruction, but the term has now taken on broader meaning to include, among others, providing humanitarian relief, protecting human rights, ensuring security, establishing non-violent modes of resolving conflicts, fostering reconciliation, repatriating refugees, and aiding in economic reconstruction. International actors, bilateral donors, international and local civil society organizations, local governments, and private security agencies may all be involved in these processes. There are many reasons why it is difficult to bring about a stable peace in a country that has been ravaged by conflict. While corruption is not the only benchmark related to fragility of a state, many of those involved in peacebuilding work are increasingly recognizing that corruption can be a major factor in preventing a stable peace from emerging.
Why? It may not only keep conflict cycles going by enriching the gangsters, warlords, or individuals who are responsible for the conflict in the first place, but it can also prevent economic and social stability because corruption networks (by benefitting some at the expense of others) strengthen inequalities and divisions in society.
