Civil society engagement is essential in the fight against corruption. This is recognised in Article 13 of UNCAC, which calls on governments to promote the active participation of civil society organisations (CSOs) in the prevention of and the fight against corruption, including increasing public access to information.

With the start-up of the UNCAC review mechanism in 2010 came an important new channel for civil society engagement in anti-corruption efforts. To facilitate contributions by CSOs to the review process, UNODC and the UNCAC Coalition have provided a number of trainings and workshops, including in September 2016 and September 2017, with a focus on the CSOs in the Southeastern Europe (SEE) region.

In order to promote collaboration between CSOs and facilitate the identification of partners, the UNCAC Coalition Southeastern Europe Anti-Corruption Regional Platform, supported by the Southeast Europe Leadership for Development and Integrity (SELDI) initiative, provides the possibility to:

• Explore, by country, the profiles and contact details of a number of active CSOs in the sub-region doing UNCAC-related work, including CSOs that attended trainings and multi-stakeholder workshops on UNCAC and its Review Mechanism;
• Learn from other CSOs in the sub-region about their involvement in UNCAC implementation and its Review Mechanism, including their contributions, obstacles they encountered, lessons learned and the best practices they uncovered; and
• Get updates on the status of the reviews in their countries, as well as the contribution of CSOs to those reviews.

CSOs interested in monitoring and promoting UNCAC implementation can increase their impact by sharing experiences and corruption-monitoring practices, building partnerships and exchanging updates about the status of UNCAC reviews.