Suchergebnisse

Do Eastern European courts effectively constrain politicians and uphold the rule of law? Criminal prosecution of grand (high-level) corruption can further the central principle of equal responsibility under the law by demonstrating that even powerful political actors have to submit to the laws of the land. This article introduces the Eastern European Corruption Prosecution Database, which contains entries for all cabinet ministers (927 in total) who served in a government that held office in one of seven post-Communist Eastern European countries since the late 1990s. The systematic data collection reveals that Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonia consistently indict more ministers than Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Poland; Slovakia has barely indicted anyone. We aim to start a research agenda by formulating hypotheses about which countries will see more corruption prosecutions and which ministers' characteristics would make them more likely to face the court. We use the database to begin testing these hypotheses and find some evidence for several associations. We find no strong evidence that EU conditionality or membership raises the profile of the grand corruption issue or leads to more indictments. Party politics seems to affect the frequency of corruption indictments more than the structure and behavior of legal institutions. Indictment rates are lower when a former Communist party controls the government and individual ministers from junior coalition partners are more vulnerable to indictment than other ministers. The existence of a specialized anti-corruption prosecution or a more independent judiciary do not seem to lead to the indictment of more ministers on corruption charges. Finally, we discuss avenues of future research that our database opens, both for the analysis of country-level and individual-level variation.

Intro -- Table of Contents -- Legal Change in Post-Communist States: Contradictions and Explanations: Peter H. Solomon Jr., Kaja Gadowska -- I. Legal Institutions -- Stemming the Tide of Illiberalism? Legal Mobilization and Adversarial Legalism in Central and Eastern Europe: Mihaela Şerban -- The Fragility of an Independent Judiciary: Lessons from Hungary and Poland-and the European Union: Kriszta Kovács, Kim Lane Scheppele -- Authoritarian Constitutionalism in Putin's Russia: A Pragmatic Constitutional Court in a Dual State: Alexei Trochev, Peter H. Solomon Jr. -- The Evolution of Policing in Post-Soviet Russia: Paternalism versus Service in Police Officers' Understanding of their Role: Olga Semukhina -- II. Legal Accountability inPublic Administration -- Prosecuting High Level Corruption in Eastern Europe: Maria Popova, Vincent Post -- When Civil Engagement is Part of the Problem: Flawed Anti-Corruptionism in Russia and Ukraine: Marina Zaloznaya, William M. Reisinger, Vicki Hesli Claypool -- Constitutional Values and Civil Servant Recruitment: The Principles for Filling Revenue Service Positions in Poland: Kaja Gadowska -- Obtaining Redress for Abuse of Office in Russia: The Soviet Legacy and the Long Road to Administrative Justice: Elena Bogdanova.

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/) which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ; The distribution of uranium isotopes (238U and 234U) in groundwaters of the south-western margin of the Great Artesian Basin (GAB), Australia, and underlying Arckaringa Basin were examined using groundwater samples and a sequential extraction of aquifer sediments. Rock weathering, the geochemical environment and α-recoil of daughter products control the 238U and 234U isotope distributions giving rise to large spatial variations. Generally, the shallowest aquifer (J aquifer) contains groundwater with higher 238U activity concentrations and 234U/238U activity ratios close to secular equilibrium. However, the source input of uranium is spatially variable as intermittent recharge from ephemeral rivers passes through rocks that have already undergone extensive weathering and contain low 238U activity concentrations. Other locations in the J aquifer that receive little or no recharge contain higher 238U activity concentrations because uranium from localised uranium-rich rocks have been leached into solution and the geochemical environment allows the uranium to be kept in solution. The geochemical conditions of the deeper aquifers generally result in lower 238U activity concentrations in the groundwater accompanied by higher 234U/238U activity ratios. The sequential extraction of aquifer sediments showed that α-recoil of 234U from the solid mineral phases into the groundwater, rather than dissolution of, or exchange with the groundwater accessible minerals in the aquifer, caused enrichment of groundwater 234U/238U activity ratios in the Boorthanna Formation. Decay of 238U in uranium-rich coatings on J aquifer sediments caused resistant phase 234U/238U activity ratio enrichment. The groundwater 234U/238U activity ratio is dependent on groundwater residence time or flow rate, depending on the flow path trajectory. Thus, uranium isotope variations confirmed earlier groundwater flow interpretations based on other tracers; however, spatial heterogeneity, and the lack of clear regional correlations, made it difficult to identify recharge and inter-aquifer leakage. ; This study and paper were funded by the Government of South Australia's Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources (DEWNR), Australia under its Bioregional Assessment Program on the Arckaringa Basin, and AINSE Ltd (Award PGRA; ALNSTU11404).