by Nuruipa Mukanova, guest researcher at Charles University, Prague, from the Anti-Corruption Business Council under the President of the Kyrgyz Republic
My first secondment was in Prague, Czech Republic, at the Charles University Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, from February 12th to March 31st this year.
Why did I choose Prague? In the last 2 years, the Czech Republic has shown very good results in combating corruption according to the Transparency International CPI index and has been ranked in the same group of countries with low levels of corruption as Georgia (56 points, 42nd place) and Latvia (58 points, 39th place).
I had planned to start my secondment right after the Istanbul regional workshop at the beginning of the New Year in 2023, but due to the late opening of the financing, I could only start from February 12th. I got a Schengen visa at the beginning of December, and there was no problem getting one with an invitation from the university. However, I experienced some difficulties in renting an apartment. For some reason, I was not able to pay Airbnb using my Visa card from Bishkek, which was quite strange. Thanks to the help of colleagues from Charles University (Professor Slavomir), I was able to book and pay the rent for the entire period of my stay in Prague.
The owner of the apartment, Mr. Marek, kindly booked a taxi from the airport and met us at the apartment. The apartment, a studio with a balcony, was in the center of Prague, in a historical location, which became my home for 1.5 months. The weather in Prague in February and March was cold, with chilling winds but no snowfalls. The sun would come out just for a few hours, and afterward, the sky would get cloudy again. But that didn’t stop me from walking around the city, seeing marvelous sights, meeting with colleagues, and just walking around the city.
On the day of arrival, my husband and I went for a walk, visited the historical center of the city, went to the Charles Bridge, and when it got dark, we decided to go home. However, neither my husband nor I remembered the address of the apartment, and we got lost. The apartment was in Prague 1, but we found ourselves in Prague 2; my cell phone died, and there was no internet connection on my husband’s phone. I got panicked. I would like to mention the very friendly attitude of the people of Prague. Someone showed us the route on their phone, someone called the owner of the apartment to find out the exact address, and a lady of 60 years practically took us to the apartment, although she had to go to the suburban railway station.
I got to know the city by walking all the time. Especially on Saturdays and Sundays, we walked for 4 hours, visiting the city’s sights one by one. We visited the National Gallery, Prague Castle, Old Town Square with the Prague astronomical clock and numerous shops, the Jewish Quarter, Petřín Hill, Petřín funicular and Vyšehrad Castle, Lennon’s wall, the buildings of the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Youth and Culture, Kampa Island with its beautiful plastic penguins, Prague Metronome, beer pubs, and wine pogreboks, the museum of Communism!!! (very unexpected). The city is always overcrowded with tourists, especially on the weekends. There were especially a lot of people on the street on the day of the inauguration of the newly elected president, and I happened to be at a protest demonstration in central Wenceslas Square the other day.
I was especially impressed by the public transportation, trams, and metro lines. You can get to any point in the city in just a few minutes. Public transport is comfortable and runs strictly according to the schedule. And most surprisingly, there were no controllers (unlike in Paris, where you should show tickets at the entrance and exits), everyone consciously paid the fare. I bought a monthly ticket for all available types of transport, and the price was quite reasonable.
On March 8th, we decided to go to Karlovy Vary, a famous spa city with mineral waters, which was especially famous in the Soviet Union, where only communist party bosses and their families could afford it. We took the Flixbus, a rather comfortable double-decker bus, and in a couple of hours, we were in Karlovy Vary. We rented an apartment via Booking.com and paid with the help of Professor Slavomir, as payment is practically cashless everywhere. For some reason, my Visa card did not work in Prague, and I could not open a new card because the short-term visa did not allow for that.
I met former Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan citizens, mainly of German origin, who all spoke Russian. I met Kazakhstani students who were studying for one semester at different European Universities in the frame of European studies.
Attention, please! You have to get at least a 6-month visa to open a card and a bank account in Prague. And one more peculiarity. If you pay cashless, all kinds of purchases, including products in the stores, are discounted. But if you pay in cash, then the discounts are not applied. Cashless payment is a very efficient anti-corruption measure that works 100% in the Czech Republic.
What else surprised and impressed me? Civil servants (as judged by an interview with a representative of the Ministry of Justice) are required to declare their income regularly: when they enter public service, when they leave public service, mandatory annual declaration, and gifts over 20 euros. And all information is open and accessible. The correctness of the declaration is checked by the Ministry of Justice, a civil service body, not a law enforcement agency. This anti-corruption measure is an international standard applied mandatorily not only by EU countries but all over the world in accordance with the UN Convention, with the exception of those counties where the level of corruption is too high.
Civil society organizations mainly work with the Parliament, they analyze law enforcement practices, draft laws, and actively advocate those laws. For civil society organizations, this is professional work, and they can be financed by the state bodies for some anti-corruption activities. This is perceived as a state order; in fact, the state agencies delegate some of their functions to the civil society organizations, and for the implementation of which the latter is financed from the budget of the state body. In the same way, it works when civil society organizations implement some anticorruption activities and events for the business community, for example, advocacy of the law, and thus financed by the business community. There is no such practice as the implementation of the project, which is financed by international donors the former CIS countries are used to. The civil society organizations’ main focus is the use of the state budget by political parties and deputies of the Parliament. Thus, public attention focuses on preventing political corruption or so-called white-collar corruption in the higher echelons of power.
Citizens and the public, in general, are not active in anti-corruption activities; as noted by representatives of Transparency International and the NGO “Reconstruction of the State,” the main reason for the so-called inactivity of citizens is that citizens do not feel the negative influence of corruption in their everyday life. Public services are received electronically, claims are sent electronically, responses are also received electronically within 6 working days, and activities of state bodies are open and transparent.
I tested the above-mentioned statements among the students of the Faculty of International Relations of Charles University. I asked the students whether they ever had a temptation to bribe professors for better marks or to buy a diploma. What anti-corruption integrity meant for them, and if they ever had encountered corruption in their life. Students from various countries, not limited to the Czech Republic and Europe, cited examples from Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia and explained their position and understanding of corruption. But none of the 15 students who participated in the guest lecture had encountered corruption in their lives. Isn’t it amazing!!! I made a parallel with the students in Kyrgyzstan and thought about what kind of answers I could expect from our University students. At least I might get an answer that every second student (according to the survey of the students in 2022 conducted by the Anticorruption Business Council under the President of the Kyrgyz Republic together with the Ministry of Education) bribed a professor and every first student would name the top 10 corrupt government agencies.
At the research seminar, I tested the hypothesis that “if there is corruption, it is deliberately created by the classical economic model of supply and demand.” Despite the fact that I gave many corrupt cases and various arguments and reasons why corruption occurred, I was hit by the question – in what way political will of the government, the legislative and executive branches of power could, be articulated? If there was a true political will of the President, did it relate to the fight against corruption by law enforcement approaches or by applying prevention of corruption approaches either?
My secondment helped me find evidence that every country could considerably reduce the burden of corruption. However, it is worth mentioning that Eastern society and its psychology is a tricky thing. How to deal with the psychology of society, which is used to solve its problems mainly by using corruption and corrupt social relations heavily? It sounds like to be or not to be…