EU rules to tackle corruption are watered-down: TI

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On Tuesday, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council reached a provisional agreement on the EU’s first-ever Directive to harmonise criminal laws on corruption across the bloc. It should have been a breakthrough: a turning point that showed the EU had finally grasped the scale of the problem and is ready to confront it with robust regulation and a zero-tolerance approach. 

Instead, the disappointing outcome showed that leaders were unwilling to deliver legislation with the backbone needed to confront entrenched corrupt interests and to deliver the reforms their citizens want to see. 

The Directive is the first legislation of its kind, years in the making, following public demands for more transparency and integrity from those in power. It arrives after scandals such as Qatargate that have exposed how political influence is bought behind closed doors, how public money is siphoned through opaque deals, and how accountability struggles to cross borders. 

The arrest this week of former EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini in a corruption investigation is a reminder that these risks are not hypothetical, nor confined to the past. Corrupt networks are adaptive and resilient. Weak laws like this watered-down Directive will not be able to disrupt them. 

Rather than setting a strong, common standard, negotiators – led by the European Council – settled for a lowest-common-denominator approach that echoes the compromises of the past. The final framework lacks the clarity, ambition and enforceability needed to change behaviour. It does nothing to shift incentives for those engaged in corruption – whether public officials, business actors or those operating in their shadow. 

The omissions are stark. The Directive sidesteps the reality of grand corruption – the high-level, cross-border schemes that do the greatest damage to democracy and security – by failing to explicitly recognise or address it. It encourages useful prevention tools, like rules on conflicts of interest and asset declarations, which require officials to publicly declare what they own so hidden wealth can be detected, yet avoids setting mandatory standards where the risks of misusing power or buying influence are highest: lobbying transparency and political finance. 

Without a requirement to publish information about who is influencing decision-makers and how political activities are funded, early signs of corruption will likely remain hidden. Crucially, while civil society has been central to exposing abuses and pushing reforms, the Directive relegates independent watchdogs to a purely consultative role and offers no measures to safeguard the space they need to operate, even as civil society organisations and journalists face growing attacks across the Bloc. 

These failures are not accidental. From the outset, multiple governments pushed to shrink the Directive’s scope, strip out consequences and dilute provisions that threatened political comfort. As we wrote earlier this year, the EU’s credibility was always going to depend on whether this effort addressed the deeper structures that enable illicit influence, not just the criminal acts at the margins. Every time the EU chooses caution over consequence, the public learns another lesson about how the system protects itself. 

Across the Union, public support for action is high and frustration is rising. Scandals have become structural rather than episodic in many countries. According to recent Eurobarometer survey findings, 69% of citizens believe corruption is widespread in their country. 

The Directive now moves toward transposition. Member states should treat it as a springboard, not a ceiling – an opportunity to lead where the EU has fallen short. Transparency International is urging governments to go further through national legislation: closing loopholes, raising integrity standards for political finance and lobbying transparency, empowering independent civic oversight, and pursuing grand corruption with the seriousness it warrants. – Transparency Inteernational