Media - Fighting Corruption or Sustaining It?

Our main goal for this plenary session is to debate the role of media as to whether they help expose or fight corruption. Do some governments control and possibly restrict their media? How can media contribute to an increased transparency in society? We wish to illuminate both sides: how the media can play a role in fighting corruption and how the media sometimes help sustain it. The plenary session will address the importance of independent media through the perspectives of three people from different continents.

Speaker 1, José Ugaz is the new chair of Transparency International. Ugaz is a Peruvian lawyer and professor with great experience in anti-corruption work. He has been appointed as Ad-Hoc State Attorney of the Republic of Peru in several corruption cases, the most famous of which is the Fujimori–Montesinos case against the former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori. During Ugaz’s administration, more than 200 judicial cases were opened against 1,500 members of the Fujimori’s network and 205 million dollars were frozen abroad and 150 million recovered. In 2002 he was President of PROETICA, the Peruvian chapter of Transparency International.

Speaker 2, Heather Brooke, is an award-winning journalist whose investigative journalism and legal action against the British Parliament for disclosure of MPs’ expenses was the catalyst of the expences scandal of 2009. The following year, she obtained the full batch of 251,287 US diplomatic cables from a Wikileaks insider and worked with The Guardian on a one-month-long exposé of global diplomatic relations. Brooke is, moreover, a professor of journalism at City University, London.

Speaker 3, Gerald Bareebe is a journalist and political scientist from Uganda. He is recognized as one of the best journalists in Uganda for leading an investigation that resulted in a 14-year jail sentence for a senior military officer who had killed two opposition activists and maimed two others. In 2009 his investigations forced the parliament to order the president to refund state funds that the president had used illegally during the 2001 presidential election. In 2010, the World Bank recognized Bareebe as one of the world’s top 10 young anti-corruption activists and offered him a World Bank fellowship to participate in the formulation of the Global Youth Anti-Corruption Campaign.