Um estudo cross-country acerca dos fatores institucionais capazes de impactar na corrupção judicial.

Abstract

The judiciary plays an elementary role in endorsing the rule of law and the ability to guarantee basic citizen rights. A properly functioning justice system is essential if corrupt practices are to be punished. However, as has been demonstrated in analyses conducted by various organizations such as Transparency International (TI), World Justice Project (WPJ), Varieties of Democracy (VDem), Latino Barometer, and the International Bar Association (IBA), the judiciary itself is not free from being susceptible to corruption, judicial corruption being a phenomenon that occurs, with greater or lesser frequency, in various countries around the world. In this sense, the corruptor and the corrupted seek to act with maximum discretion so that their conducts are not discovered, seeking, in this way, to obtain the maximum advantage at the lowest possible cost. The spread of the practice is capable of producing a discredited judiciary, causing instability and possibly leading part of society to seek inappropriate and illegal means in search of justice. Thus, the central objective of this work is to seek to identify which factors are capable of impacting the control of judicial corruption. To this end, in addition to a theoretical survey, statistical tests were performed using as unit of analysis a total of 102 (one hundred and two) countries located on all continents of the world, in order to test the hypothesis that the institutional factors of judicial accountability, judicial independence and transparency of the judiciary have an accentuated relevance in controlling the phenomenon, so that greater levels of accountability, independence and transparency in judicial systems would result in environments less favorable to judicial corruption. The selection of countries was based on data available in the World Justice Project (WJP), Varieties of Democracy (VDem), and Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) databases, from which the dependent and independent variables were extracted. The results show that, in fact, there are statistically significant relationships that indicate that it is possible to conclude that low levels of judicial accountability, independence, and transparency can create a favorable environment for the spread of judicial corruption.