Today the second anti-corruption conference was held, hosted by the Ministry of Public Service, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Unit at the US Embassy and the Good Governance Unit. At the first conference, the participants made certain resolutions that they want to accomplish and today they took stock of the progress they made. According to the director of the GGU, moving the Whistleblowers Act along in the House was one of those resolutions.
Cesar Ross, Director, Good Governance Unit
"One of them, and we're working with the National Assembly on it, was the Protected Disclosure, the Whistleblowers, that was read a couple years ago and no action has resulted. How can we speed it up? So we have met with the National Assembly, we're meeting with the Attorney General to see what is it that has slowed it down in committee. and so we are working on it. We also talked about making sure the procurement, the gold standards to procurement and to open contracting is something that should be embedded in our system. So that was talked about in the first conference and so the contractor general who has been a partner with us for the past two years has looked at that and between her and the procurement officer in the Ministry of Finance have worked to develop a policy that maximizes those standards."
"One of the capacity building programs we have that is going to be launched in January is all FO's and all the line ministries but we're not limiting it to the ministries, we're also bringing in statutory bodies because they also deal with taxpayers' money. And so all of the FO's will be brought in and will be, their capacity in identifying corruption, their capacity in streamlining and in being transparent is going to be built up."
Rolando Zetina, CEO, Ministry of Public Service
"How do we benefit, we benefit because what our GGU is doing, they are working with different partners within Belize and they are coming up with how to establish systems that will assist, maybe not in the immediate or right now but sometime in the future because as you may know if systems are not in place then nothing can be implemented so we're working on that, that is where the benefit will come, when we have the system in place, when we work with the Integrity Commission, when we work with the Central Bank, when we work with the BTS, the tax department and things like that."
Nicole Heydari, INL Coordinator, US Embassy
"I think there are several areas where we have strengthen collaboration, some of them were mentioned by Ambassador Kwan in her speech, we've been working closely with the Financial Intelligence Unit with very good results, the National Forensic Science Service has also seen a lot of results with accreditation. In fact, Belize is the first country in the Caribbean and Central America that has achieved accreditation according to international standards for its forensic experts, so this is actually a big accomplishment, the certification process that they're undergoing and it's promising as we continue to work together and the political will that we're seeing accompany this efforts for 2025."
We note that not a single minister of government or elected official was in attendance - a striking omission from a government elected on an anti-corruption platform.
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