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Background

Grand corruption is the abuse of high-level power that benefits the few at the expense of the many. In countries where its leaders enrich themselves with public funds, it is affecting everyone’s life on many levels. Infrastructure, health care, and education are massively underfunded, depriving you and the next generations of fundamental rights and services. Civil societies' resistance to corrupt leadership and political opposition are often repressed and can lead to imprisonment, torture, or even death. But even if you live in a country where grand corruption is not an issue, it affects you.

Problem Statement

181 countries are party to the UN Convention Against Corruption, which requires them to criminalize bribery of public officials, embezzlement of public funds, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. But few countries enforce these laws at the national level, creating impunity for these crimes. The main challenge in fighting corruption internationally is that grand corruption relies on transnational money laundering networks and existing cross-border investigations are insufficient to hold most corrupt leaders and their co-conspirators accountable. An International Anti-Corruption Court can fill the critical enforcement gap, but it will need to be able to gather sufficient evidence from sources in numerous countries in any given case.

Mapping the Challenge

How ​can ​we ​help ​corruption investigators, legal experts, and journalists to quickly identify complex corruption schemes and illustrate relationships between individuals and companies ​by overlapping open datasets and cross-referenced resources ​when ​databases are not homogenous/transparent/accessible internationally ​instead ​of working individually and relying on scattered, incomplete or outdated information?

Sub-questions

• How can we help to create a mechanism that allows investigators to access open-source data internationally?
• How can the solution support existing databases on topics to fight corruption?
• How can we best enable civil society to contribute in supporting, collecting and working with the solution’s outputs?
• How can social channels play a role in the solution information feed? (data scraping, scanning, selection, etc.)

Criteria

• Combine all these data sources of currently available and collaborating databases;
• Utilize and overlap international sources and information;
• Allow corruption investigators to use available information;
• Provide visual assistance in creating connections between available sources;
• The solution should do more than simply retrieving data for example it should be searchable;
• The solution should keep the integrity of the source to prevent misinformation;
• The solution’s output should be in a format/level of verification to produce evidential content;
• The solution’s proof of concept could consider incorporating further functionalities in the next stages of development such as adding/suggesting content or adaptations/versions;
• The solution could allow for a functionality similar to or fulfilling the purposes of “referencing a source” such as cross-verification;
• The solution could allow for a user to build and keep an evidential case where he/she is able to build upon datasets and add resources over time;
• The solution could allow for a user to be notified or kept up to date on a certain topic of interest;
• The solution could copy and store the latest version of a resource retrieval (since some websites are hard to keep online and be maintained in the long-term
• The solution should have security and confidentiality as a core component;
• The purpose of the solution should not be direct reporting by citizens (this will be processed by IACC.