Month: October 2025

Procurement, Anti-Corruption and Professionalism Training in Argentina

On October 16, 2025, GW Law’s Professor Christopher Yukins took part online in a program for Argentine judges coordinated by distinguished GW alumna Genoveva Ferrero of the General Secretariat of Administration and Budget of the Judiciary of the City of Buenos Aires, “Programa Intensivo de Perspectivas Comparadas en Derechos Humanos, Justicia Penal y Contratación Pública,” an intensive program on comparative approaches to human rights, criminal law and public procurement. Professor Yukins spoke on “Lucha contra la corrupción y transparencia en la contratación pública” — the fight against corruption in public procurement. Slides

Victoria Christoff (GW Law)

Genoveva Ferrero also helped lead the 3-4 November 2025 Public Procurement Congress held at the Faculty of Law, University of Buenos Aires.

Victoria Christoff, professorial lecturer in law at GW, participated in the Congress, presenting on the current reforms of the U.S. federal procurement system. The panel, moderated by Barbara Fernandez Villa, the sub-secretary of the Cabinet of Ministers for the Republic of Argentina, also included Professor Andrea Sundstrand, professor of public procurement at the University of Stockholm, and a representative from the Office of Economics and Commerce from the European Union delegation in Buenos Aires. Ms. Christoff’s slides (in Spanish) are here.

Photo credit: Sope Williams LinkedIn Post

The Buenos Aires Congress was very much a meeting of procurement professors from around the world. In the photo at left: Andrea Sundstrand (Stockholm University), Sope Williams (Stellenbosch University), Annamaria La Chimia (U. Nottingham), Gabriella Racca (U. Turin), Genoveva Ferrero (organizer), Patricia Valcárcel (U. Vigo), Tünde Tátrai (Corvinus U.) and Victoria Christoff (GW Law).

Appearing by video recording (to facilitate translation), Professor Yukins contributed an online lecture at the Congress in which he assessed the United Kingdom’s Public Sector Fraud Authority — a unique initiative internationally to use classic compliance measures to reduce the risks of fraud and corruption in the public sector.

The panel, moderated by Paola Laurenzano, Procurement Coordinator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Argentina, also included Viviana Mora, Head of the User Management Division of the Public Procurement and Contracting Directorate, ChileCompra, GW Law alumnus Jean-Jacques Verdeaux, Procurement Manager, Latin America and Caribbean Region, The World Bank, and Javier Dávila Pérez, Chief of the Financial Management and Procurement Division, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Professor Yukins’ recorded presentation appears below.

Open Contracting in ASEAN Nations: Conference and Report

GW Law Webinar Series 2025: Open Contracting Around the Globe

Shortly after GW Law’s worldwide webinar on open contracting, GW Law’s Professor Christopher Yukins joined a regional conference in Borneo, held in Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak. That conference helped launch a report, prepared by Professor Yukins and GW Law students Anisley Sanchez and Ellen Rolda for the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), on legal issues in open contracting in the ASEAN member states.

ASEAN was established in 1967 with the signing of the ASEAN Declaration by Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Since then, Brunei Darussalam, Viet Nam, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Cambodia have joined, to make up what is today the ten member states of ASEAN. (Timor-Leste, the newest Member State, had not formally joined ASEAN at the time the study launched.)

Kuching — capital of Malaysia’s Sarawak state, Borneo (credits)

At a September 2025 regional conference in Kuching, Malaysia which helped launch the study, experts from around the world discussed the prospects for open contracting as an anti-corruption tool in the ASEAN nations. The conference outcomes document called for a strengthening of legal and policy frameworks, aligned with core open contracting principles of disclosure, participation, and accountability.

The forthcoming UNODC report is the next step – an in-depth look at what is needed, from a legal and regulatory perspective, to bring open contracting to the ASEAN member states.

Open contracting is a simple concept: it means making public procurement data both accessible (typically by posting it online) and machine-readable (so that the data can be readily scanned and assessed). As the Open Contracting Partnership explains, open contracting “consists of disclosure and citizen engagement throughout the entire procurement process,” which “increases competition, improves public service delivery, creates better feedback loops, and ensures better value for money.”

The report will assess the prospects for open contracting in the ASEAN nations by looking to ten factors highlighted in a landmark report, How can we legislate for open contracting? (2021), published by the Open Contracting Partnership:

  1. Set out clear principles for all public procurement procedures in a single piece of overarching legislation.
  2. Establish strong anti-corruption and conflict of interest provisions.
  3. Promote competition and provide clear safeguards in non-competitive procedures, such as those used in emergency procurement.
  4. Ensure clear requirements to publish information at all stages of the procurement process, and maintain a complete record in one location.
  5. Use digital platforms and open data standards to foster and increase transparency and accessibility to information about public procurement procedures.
  6. Enforce publication requirements, deadlines, and clearly manage exemptions.
  7. Create procedures for public participation and monitoring across the entire procurement cycle.
  8. Support an accessible and effective complaints procedure.
  9. Empower oversight authorities.
  10. Provide effective guidance and guidelines to make procurement processes accessible and user-friendly to government, private sector, and civic users or observers of the system.