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Tailor-made laws in the Western Balkans: State capture in disguise. CEPS Policy Contribution 11 May 2020.

Vurmo, Gjergji (2020) Tailor-made laws in the Western Balkans: State capture in disguise. CEPS Policy Contribution 11 May 2020. [Policy Paper]

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    Abstract

    Imagine you are the leader of a corrupt political elite in a Western Balkan country, writes the author of this paper in a compelling call to the EU to take note of political realities in this region. You are pressured to fight “widespread corruption in all areas”, but you cannot afford to lose control of the power you have acquired over the years. How do you navigate away from all that pressure? Here is a guide that will help buy you some time… decades literally. This CEPS Policy Insight takes a lively rhetorical approach to showing how state capture in the Western Balkans has been ignored since the launch of the region’s EU accession process, despite the many examples highlighted by civil society and independent media. It argues that while the EU first acknowledged the clear signs of state capture in an official document in 2016, Western Balkan political elites had already built powerful networks of corrupt interests around them. Not only that, they had already reached the highest point of state capture – tailor-made laws.

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    Item Type: Policy Paper
    Subjects for non-EU documents: EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > Third Pillar/JHA/PJCC/AFSJ > human rights
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > law & legal affairs-general (includes international law)
    EU policies and themes > External relations > EU-South-Eastern Europe (Balkans)
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > media
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > political affairs > governance: EU & national level
    Subjects for EU documents: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Series and Periodicals: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Annual Reports: UNSPECIFIED
    Series: Series > Centre for European Policy Studies (Brussels) > CEPS Policy Contributions
    Depositing User: Daniel Pennell
    Official EU Document: No
    Language: English
    Date Deposited: 15 Apr 2021 11:08
    Number of Pages: 9
    Last Modified: 15 Apr 2021 11:08
    URI: http://aei.pitt.edu/id/eprint/103372

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