Mr. Rouhani was addressing a specialist meeting of inspecting bodies of government, ministries, organizations, and governorates across the nation on Wednesday, shed some light to the darker interiors of the mechanisms of inspection and check and balance, which however was failing in detecting and preventing the corruption which had gone unnoticed by the whistleblowers and or received their complicity in the expropriation of pubic assets.
Mr. Rouhani’s lamentations are well founded; the oil corruption where the court procession ended just weeks ago and Mr. Babak Zanjani received a death penalty for charges of high corruption. Many other cases of corruption still continue to leak to the media and the public as President Rouhani well describes it as ‘more supervising and keen than any other state mechanisms to control behavior of the government.’
President Rouhani told the meeting in a solemn tone that the state of the affairs in terms of controlling the corruption and general mismanagement in the ranks and files of the system was far from successful and working; “either the laws in place should be seriously reviewed to make them more effective; or the bodies and organizations responsible for executing the law are lax enough to allow and tolerate the amazing scope of the mismanagement and corruption,” he emphasized. “The public still awaits persuasive answers to many questions in Judiciary’s handling of the corruption; Mr. Zanjani has received a sentence; but the demanding question should still be answered why an individual should be given such scope of activity and opportunity to have access to and handle huge sums of money without any special government affiliation and just by virtue of being linked to some important officials in the government; the stolen money should be returned to the public purse; this is a public demand that should be addressed above all other considerations.”
Rouhani’s government itself had to face the Salary Bill Scandal. In that case, the Judiciary had been active while Judiciary officials criticized the government of not providing enough evidence of corrupt officials receiving inordinate amounts in their salary bills as salary and benefits without effective supervision. “Despite the multiplicity of bodies with a claim to control and inspect the behavior of officials and organizations, the organizational laxity and lethargy had resulted in allowing systemic corruption which had mocked the laws on place and the bodies remained just onlookers,” Rouhani lamented.
He believed Parliament was in a place to question, inspect, and control every organization by virtue of the fact that it was the highest and foremost branch in approving laws; “however, it, just like any other supervising body, had been untouched by the corruption it is supposed to see with keener eyes; such laxity would highly damage public trust upon the system as the strong supporter of public good and as a body to safeguard national assets from falling to unauthorized and corrupt hands which enjoyed status of cronies in a system unscathed by effective supervision,” he told the meeting.
Rouhani’s address however provided little remedy to the status quo he described as such; “parallel bodies have proved insufficient and inefficient in addressing the corruption; in such situation, the public should be asked for help; only through public support would any campaign against inveterate corruption succeed in exposing the vices of the system and to clean the system of unwanted intruders,” he said.
“The public should trust the judiciary system; the Judiciary should keep itself healthy and working so that public invest hopes to reinstate justice in any courts; all individuals should be viewed as having equal status regardless of their race, religion, and ethnic affiliations; wealth and social standing should not provide some individuals with better positions before the justice,” he demanded.
Rouhani’s last touch was Citizens' Rights Charter; “the Charter had been prepared during the first 100 days of the government; however, during 4 years, it had been changing through effective expert advice incorporated to it,” he concluded.
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