AMAN participated in TI’s International Conference and Annual Membership Meeting held from 25-29 October in Bali, Indonesia, where more than 150 delegates from over 90 national chapters around the world met to exchange information, views and experience.

Important issues were discussed during the conference such as poverty and development, political corruption, corruption in the judiciary, the United Nations Convention against Corruption and monitoring  mechanism, asset recovery, civil society monitoring, in addition to discussing some of TI internal governance issues.

 AMAN and other Arab national chapters such as Transparency Lebanon and Transparency Morocco that are full members in TI participated in the board of directors’ elections. Other Arab countries such as Algeria and Kuwait participated in the conference activities.

Dr. Azmi Shuaibi, AMAN’s General Coordinator presented to participants at the conference the Palestinian experience on integrating anti-corruption activities within the education process for the youth. During the past year AMAN managed to implement recreational activities for school children such as summer camps and puppet shows that deal with corruption, in addition to providing training courses for the school and university teachers with the aim of promoting the values of integrity, principles of transparency and systems of accountability in the Palestinian society and educating the students and teachers on how to combat corruption. Furthermore, in cooperation with Birzeit University, AMAN developed an Anti Corruption Curriculum that will be used in Birzeit University during the current semester as a first experiment and will be subsequently distributed to the rest of the Palestinian universities.

On the other hand, Manar Salem, National Anti Corruption Campaign Project Manager, participated in 2 workshops held on UNCAC during the conference; one on Advancing and Monitoring UNCAC and another on Preparing for the UNCAC states parties’ conference to be held in Indonesia end of January 2008.

During these workshops, AMAN pointed out its achievements in the field of advocating for the implementation of UNCAC in Palestine which included the signing of a Memorandum of Cooperation with the Palestinian government in which the government indicated its willingness to abide by the major issues stipulated in the UNCAC, to adopt Anti corruption policies and to implement coordinated activities within the framework of a national plan of action against corruption.

Additionally, AMAN is currently preparing research on gaps in local legislation and institutional policies regarding anti corruption which will include recommendations on reforming or drafting new anti corruption legislation and developing anti corruption national plan of action based on the UNCAC provisions.

 AMAN has also managed to build strong anti corruption networks from the civil society such as Journalists against Corruption, NGO’s against Corruption and Parliamentarians against corruption that will be effective in monitoring and pressuring government to combat corruption.