Accountability Counsel, the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (“ICAR”), and OECD Watch have conducted research to evaluate the National Contact Point (“NCP”) peer review process and identify opportunities for improvement, with the ultimate aim of ensuring that NCPs are functionally equivalent and provide effective access to remedy.
The findings and recommendations are based on a desk review as well as interviews with 27 individuals from NCPs (both those under review and those that have acted as reviewers), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (“OECD”) Secretariat, the OECD Anti-Corruption Division, and stakeholders (civil society, labour, and business) who participated in the Belgian, Danish, Italian, Swiss, and Chilean NCP peer reviews.
NCPs, as well as their stakeholders, generally found the peer review process to be beneficial. However, this research has found that there were important variations across peer reviews and that implementation of peer review recommendations has been incomplete and often ad-hoc, focusing on relatively easy fixes like promotion-related activities, rather than changes to more impactful issues, such as those related to institutional structure and the specific instance process.
Accountability Counsel, ICAR, and OECD Watch call on the OECD and NCPs to implement the recommendations contained in this report. We further call for the Core Template for Voluntary Peer Reviews of NCPs to be revised to address the deficiencies identified in this report. Doing so will ensure a robust peer review process moving forward and high-performingeffective NCPs.
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