Law Commons^™

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't? The Oecd Convention And The Globalization Of Anti-Bribery Measures, Christopher F. Corr, Judd Lawler

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This article explores the efforts of the international community to battle corruption by focusing on the recently promulgated Organization of Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD) Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions. For many years the United States battled corruption by prohibiting its domestic businesses from bribing foreign officials. Other countries, however, generally viewed U.S. policy as a form of unilateral commercial disarmament and declined to pass their own anti-bribery legislation. The Convention, therefore, marks a recent shift by the international community, as it requires signatories to enact laws to punish domestic corporations for bribes …