ISLAMABAD: The representatives of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) have agreed to establish SAARC Anti-Corruption Forum to interact to interact on regular basis for deliberating anti-corruption issues and other areas of mutual cooperation for the purpose.
The proposal for setting up an anti-graft forum was floated by National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman Qamar Zaman Chaudhry at a two-day SAARC Nations Seminar on Anti-Corruption that concluded on Tuesday.
At the conclusion of the seminar, the NAB chairman read out a joint declaration in which the participants resolved to work collectively to find out the causes of corruption in South Asia and identify the ways to eradicate corruption from respective countries.
They agreed to share the experiences, expertise, tools and techniques among the SAARC member states to identify the corruption and corrupt practices and their eradication from the region.
The participants proposed to initiate programmes for capacity building of the personnel of the anti-corruption authorities of the SAARC member countries. They also agreed to initiate formulating the “guidelines” to govern SAARC-AFC in consultation with and approval from their respective governments.
The NAB chairman said that during the two-day activity, the anti-corruption authorities of participating countries had a good opportunity to know and discuss issues of corruption in detail. “We’ve commonality of issues and discussed in detail how to tackle the issue of corruption jointly,” he said.
He said SAARC states needed a programme to regularly interact among one another for making the region corruption-free, adding that the NAB was forthcoming to extend all sort of support for the purpose.
At the end, the member states appreciated NAB’s efforts in eradication of corruption from the country as according to them Pakistan is the only country in the SAARC whose corruption Perception Index (CPI), according to Transparency International, in 2014 decreased from 175 to 126, and in 2015 decreased from 126 to 117 which is a record achievement.
