The Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC) of the Republic of Korea organizes a training course to help build national anti-corruption capacity of Costa Rica and Paraguay.

The training course will take place on October 17 to 22 at the Anti-Corruption Training Institute of the ACRC in Cheongju by inviting ten public officials from the Public Ethics Office of Costa Rica and the Office of the Comptroller General of Paraguay.

The ACRC came up with a plan to host this course to follow up on the official request made by the governments of Costa Rica and Paraguay a couple of years ago. The anti-corruption training course was scheduled for 2022 when Korea marked the 60th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations respectively with the two countries.

Conducted in the Spanish language, this tailored capacity-building program is the first of its kind that the ACRC has ever organized for countries in Central and South America.

The participants of the week-long training course include José Armando López Baltodano, Procurator Director of the Public Ethics Office of Costa Rica; and Augusto José Félix Paiva, Deputy Comptroller General of Paraguay.

The training program covers Korea’s major anti-corruption measures including Integrity Assessment, Corruption Risk Assessment, whistleblower protection and reward program, and the anti-corruption web portal (www.clean.go.kr).

It will focus on Integrity Assessment, which is designed to measure the levels of integrity in individual public organizations, and identify and remove corruption risks in each organization.

Integrity Assessment has gained international recognition as best practices in the anti-corruption field as the first place winner of 2012 UN Public Service Awards in the category of “preventing and combating corruption”. The assessment program has been introduced to five countries including Indonesia, Mongolia and Thailand.

An ACRC Official said at the welcome event on Monday “the ACRC will spare no efforts to help Costa Rica and Paraguay adopt Korea’s anti-corruption systems such as Integrity Assessment and Corruption Risk Assessment.”

The Chairperson added “the ACRC will continue to expand technical assistance to Central and South America, Africa and Middle East beyond Asia in line with chapter VI of the United Nations Convention against Corruption, devoted to technical assistance and information exchange”.