Your Eminence,
Reverend,
Mr. Prosecutor,
Mr. President of the Supreme Courts,
Ministers,
I am pleased to welcome the National Coordinator against corruption, the Honorary Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Mr. Tentes, here, to the wider space of the Foreign Ministry, in my capacity as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
It is our honor to share premises with, not to say “host,” a new, extremely ambitious and, I would like to hope, functional and effective institution, and I hope that our sharing these premises functions as an additional positive omen for our collaboration and also as an added guarantee of the implementation of rules of transparency, starting from our space, which has a very limited relationship with economic administration, but is very much involved in managing national challenges, particularly in the current state of affairs, which is both internationally and nationally very difficult and pressured.
Our decision to institutionalize the position of National Coordinator against corruption provided an additional international assurance of our faith in this effort, which is an international obligation for our country, but also, and mainly, our own constitutional, democratic and rule-of-law obligation.
Mr. Tentes referred earlier to the Christian foundations of morality. We implement constitutional ethics; something more than simple legality, because we are referring to values that are of particular importance.
Naturally, people have grown weary of hearing certain words, like the war against corruption, the war against intertwining interests, the need for guarantees of transparency, and we are in danger of falling victim to an over-proliferation of authorities and organs that are competent for acting in the name of constitutional legality, democracy, and the Greek people. The fundamental system of guarantees against corruption is the judiciary, the existing classic system of guarantees of the rule of law. Subsequently, we saw organization internationally, initially in the Anglo-American sphere, of a parallel system of independent authorities. In 2001, we institutionalized – and I had the honor of being the rapporteur for that comprehensive constitutional revision – the Independent Authorities, as institutions provided for by the Constitution. And this is producing results, despite there still being issues of relationships, particularly with the judiciary branch; issues that must be resolved and will be resolved, I imagine, gradually.
But there was a need for a coordinator of this whole effort. And in the person of the then outgoing Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, the government found the right, the most tested, the most battle-ready person, and we thank him for accepting a slight shortening of his prosecutorial term, so that he could take on this challenge. And thus his successor also had the opportunity to back him as head of the Public Prosecutor Authority, due to the hierarchical structure of that Authority.
Of course, we haven’t completely avoided the misunderstandings that dominate public life. There is major and organized corruption, there is small and pervasive corruption. There is corruption that is based in political power, in public administration, in the public sector, and there is corruption based in the private sector. Because, after all, the crisis, the structural crisis that broke out in 2008, and that we became fully aware of in 2010, is not just a crisis of the state and the public sector. It is also a crisis of the private sector. And we have made a huge effort to restructure the state and the public sector. We are awaiting corresponding moves from the private sector as well.
Moreover, a very great misapprehension is the conviction Greeks have – because we believe that we are the cleverest people in the world – that we are the country with the most corruption. This is not the case. There are countries that are handling vast economic challenges and are deeply mired in corruption. The European Union itself, the European Commission itself and its collateral institutions very often bring huge corruption cases to light.
So there is a need for a very systematic effort, which concerns anti-corruption, as Mr. Tentes said, transparency, the battle in favor of the autonomy of the political branch, of the judiciary. But, as you can see, even if we want to talk in terms of powers and to identify corruption with power, power is not just political, power is not just parliamentary and governmental. There is huge economic power. There is communication power, there is power in the spheres of societal activities, like sports. There is power that is linked with non-political aspects of the state, like the judiciary or public administration at non-political levels.
And, moreover, corruption doesn’t necessarily mean majority and government. It can concern, more generally, the manner in which public life functions. We have an inclination to target only the political world, and this creates an unfair picture of how things are. It is created by the political world itself, through the conversion of disagreements into allegations of corruption. It takes a great effort to discern a real case involving corruption from a political disagreement that becomes bitter.
We do an injustice to the institutions of democracy when we cannot make this distinction, and we allow the real perpetrators of corruption to avoid the notice of the new media and auditing mechanisms. So we need to converse much more openly, much more courageously about these issues and organize our efforts. The government has the will and the need to achieve this, also for reasons, if you will, of obvious political ends: Because this is one of society’s demands.
However, society, as you know, wants the truth, but is very often charmed by the lie and votes for the lie, and this is the major problem we need to confront at this time. Real coordination is needed. Real legislative integration and integrity is needed. And we need very good international and European cooperation if we are to get tangible results on the ground, where the problem really exists. Because often someone points to a false target in order to divert attention from the real target.
With these thoughts, Mr. Prosecutor, I bid you welcome to your facilities and hope that things go well here, that you heighten your role and show, as you have already done, de facto, how important it is for us to coordinate our institutional action and show results that society will see not as demagogic and fleeting, but as being permanent and institutional in nature.
I wish you all health and every success.
November 4, 2014