The conference also saw the latest U.N. endorsement of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The U.N.’s anti-corruption body welcomed top Chinese and Russian officials to a high-level conference in Atlanta last week, including for a propaganda-filled session about Beijing’s notorious Belt and Road infrastructure-investment scheme, National Review has learned.
Although they led sessions that took place on the side of the main proceedings, they were located at the conference for the members of the U.N.’s Convention against Corruption — meaning that the U.N.’s Office of Drugs and Crime approved them. UNODC did not respond to NR’s request for comment.
In comments to NR, Hudson Institute scholar Nate Sibley slammed UNODC’s decision to tacitly amplify Beijing’s and Moscow’s narratives on anti-corruption on U.S. soil, pointing to their miserable records on that score.
“Their presence not only insulted participating governments that are working hard, albeit imperfectly, to root out corruption — it felt menacing for the NGO activists in attendance whose work had exposed Beijing and Moscow’s corrupt influence within their own societies,” said Sibley, a research fellow with Hudson’s Kleptocracy Initiative.
“I understand countries have a responsibility to admit officials from unsavory regimes if they host a UN event. But it felt particularly galling to hear China and Russia’s lies being spread, unanswered, on U.S. soil under the guise of diplomacy with full UN backing,” Sibley said.
The Russia-hosted UNODC event was billed as the opening of an exhibition that displayed works created by the winners of its “Together against corruption!” poster-making competition for children. In addition to officials from Russia’s anti-corruption agency, UNODC officer Jason Reichelt, a former U.S. prosecutor, appeared on the dais and congratulated them on the initiative.
Transparency International has consistently ranked Russia among the world’s most corrupt countries in its annual survey. “Under Putin, Russia has become the very embodiment of a kleptocracy, as corrupt high-level officials and politically connected individuals embezzle and misappropriate funds on a massive scale,” the group said, launching its report for 2022.
Russian diplomats spent time during the conference working to stymie its proceedings alongside their Iranian and Venezuelan counterparts, according to Victor Liakh, a conference attendee and the CEO of East Europe Foundation. That group is a Ukrainian nonprofit that supports digital technologies for government that make bribe-taking more difficult, as Ukraine grapples with its own record of corruption. He accused those delegations of dragging out meetings late into the evening to sabotage the conference’s plenary proceedings.
“We need to understand that corruption is an essential part of Russian government structure. This is the essence of that,” said Liakh, who spoke at an event conducted by the Ukrainian government. He viewed the Russian anti-corruption poster project as a campaign to use children’s drawings to distract from Moscow’s record.
The conference also saw the latest U.N. endorsement of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the massive, behemoth multi-billion-dollar initiative that encompasses investments in infrastructure projects in dozens of countries across the globe. UNODC director Ghada Waly attended and spoke at the Chinese event, saying that Beijing had “turned the vision of a clean silk road into action and reality,” according to Sibley. She appeared alongside Chinese officials, including Cai Wei of the country’s National Commission of Supervision anti-corruption agency.
Numerous U.N. agencies have already signed agreements with the Chinese government to embed the BRI into their own work.
In October, Secretary General Antonio Guterres attended China’s annual forum for BRI, delivering warm praise of the initiative: “The Belt and Road demonstrates that we have historic opportunity to build more than green cities, communities and transportation and power systems.”
The Chinese government-led panel was titled “Belt and Road Integrity Building,” and it kicked off with a ten-minute long video that hailed the BRI as an exemplar of anti-graft initiatives in action.
This was an apparent response to growing concern among BRI participants that many of its projects are linked to graft. A 2021 study by AidData found that leaders in some developing countries have canceled prominent BRI projects due to corruption, in addition to other factors, such as the high-debt levels involved.
“From a stadium on the grassland, to the rising central business district in the desert, a variety of projects are being built in a corruption-free environment,” a voice over narration in the video stated, while also pointing to European ports being infused with “Chinese genes,” a U.S. mining facility, and power plants in Asia.