The European Union’s Position on the Phenomenon of Corruption

At the beginning of the 1990s, the European Union adopted the so-called Copenhagen criteria, in which Member States and aspiring states were called on to ground their activities on the rule of law. It is assumed that this concept also extends to the issue of corruption, or rather, an effective fight against this phenomenon. In fact, however, the main solutions in this area were for years based on the anti-corruption conventions established by the Council of Europe and the UN. The EU itself was quite restrained in this respect. Although some normative solutions were adopted, they were not within any mainstream European legislation. These matters were raised for the second time in the years 2008–2017, but also then no specific solutions were adopted at the level of the entire EU. Currently, we can see a third take on this issue, i.e. a proposal for a new directive on combating corruption. This time, it seems that the will to confront this problem is much stronger than before. Moreover, it has been noted that corruption is often a mirror image of organised crime, human trafficking, or the waste of funds transferred to Member States from the EU budget.