ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the relation between corruption and human rights by drawing on research on civil society and state crime in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The research was part of the International State Crime Initiative’s project ‘State Crime and Resistance: A Comparative Study of Civil Society’, and concerned the ways in which civil society organizations (CSOs) in countries with high levels of state violence and corruption defined and resist state crime. The chapter discusses the definition of corruption and its relationship with human rights, illustrating the argument with examples from PNG. It looks more closely at the specific forms that corruption takes in PNG before turning to two forms of opposition to it: the global anti-corruption ‘industry’ and its PNG representatives, and that of the CSOs in our own study. Corporations that do not rely on bribery to influence states may well find it useful to present a ‘clean’ image by supporting anti-corruption campaigns such as Transparency International.
