Undue influence in law-making can lead to opportunities and impunity for corruption. It can also legalise state capture – the control of a nation’s affairs by private interests. Tailor-made laws help serve private interests of individuals, narrow groups and companies. This often happens at the cost of others, including the public. Although a tailor-made law seems to have a general purpose, in fact it applies to a particular matter – like a business opportunity or weakening a public institution – and prevents courts from stopping and punishing specific instances of corruption.
Democratic law-making is key to a fair society that represents the many rather than the few.
Throughout the Western Balkans and Turkey however, there are tailor-made laws which support corruption and state capture. Governments in the region have passed many laws that, for example, give privileged contracts, reduce penalties and privatise public resources for the benefit of the few. These laws are betraying citizens and handing them the bill for corruption.
We want to draw attention to tailor-made laws, improve understanding of how corruption and state capture work and push for change, so we have created a database with details of tailor-made laws in the region.
Here you can read summaries and in-depth descriptions of tailor-made laws. They reveal how law-making is used to protect private interests while enabling impunity. They also illustrate some of the areas where this is happening, so that politicians lacking integrity can be held to account.
We would like everyone who visits this database to use the information it contains to call on decision-makers to engage in law-making which is democratic, frees states from capture and prohibits all types of corruption.
You can find tailor-made laws dating from 2005 to present day in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey. The laws can be filtered by country, topic, type and sector ranging from infrastructure to public institutions to private finance. Every country and sector has its own page with background information (just filter by a single country or sector) and you can change the database into the main language of each of these countries.
The database is not meant to be fully comprehensive and does not include all the tailor-made laws in each country. It takes a qualitative approach to the laws, serving as a tool to understand how law-making is influenced.
This database was created and maintained with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of Transparency International and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union
