Defending Democracy and Freedoms: Integrity as our Shield

Information as Resistance: Defending Democracy with Integrity, Transparency, and Civic Literacy

Participants from Brazil, South Africa, and the US will share how citizens and institutions are resisting disinformation and the lack of state transparency that fuel impunity. They will present key tools for protecting courts & elections, tracking election denial, preserving public records, and building youth civic literacy.

Modernizing the Fight: How to Survive Disinformation Attacks against Your Organization

Even as traditional funding and support systems grow more fragile, anti-corruption advocates face increasingly sophisticated threats. Coordinated efforts to misinform, intimidate, defund, and erode public trust are spreading, undermining organizations and posing an existential threat to our ecosphere. This workshop contributes to the collective response needed to operate in this new environment.

Why is this topic relevant to the fight against corruption? (please briefly outline the corruption angle) (295/300) Failure to properly address aggressive disinformation campaigns can lead to efficiency losses, reputational harm, and even organizational collapse, as recent examples show. Understanding how these attacks are designed helps build defenses that strengthen resilience and protect our institutions.

Foreign Influence or Global Kleptocracy? Reassessing the Problem, Rebuilding the Toolkit

Corruption, money laundering and foreign influence can no longer be treated as separate issues. Illicit and semi-licit wealth now act as geopolitical power, connecting kleptocrats, strategic investments, disinformation, sanctions evasion and professional enablers inside global institutions. Has the distinction between “foreign influence” and “domestic” kleptocracy collapsed? And what comes next?

Political Corruption: The Delicate Role that Prosecutors and Judges must play

Illicit funding—from individuals, state resources, corporations, or foreign actors—continues to undermine elections globally, while enforcement remains constrained by political and institutional barriers. This session by P4I, EFOR, and TI France examines landmark corruption cases, prosecution challenges, and strategies to strengthen accountability in political finance.

Igniting Integrity in Public Decision-Making

ODIHR will present key findings from its research on public integrity across the OSCE region and its parliamentary integrity assessment methodology. Alongside GRECO evaluations and international standards, the panel will highlight innovative solutions, regional perspectives, national challenges and offer cross-continental perspectives in strengthening public integrity frameworks.

Integrity or Illusion? Strengthening Anti-Corruption to Safeguard Democracy

ODIHR’s side-event aims to share good practices and experiences on supporting democratic institutions in upholding integrity for MPs and PTEFs and strengthening oversight. The panel will showcase ODIHR’s assessment tools, link public integrity and anti-corruption strategies, highlight regional practices, and foster dialogue among inter-governmental institutions, authorities and civil society.

Defending Democracy: Integrity and International Cooperation as a Shield Against Illicit Power

Latin America has become a key laboratory for the global tensions that threaten democracy today: concentration of power, setbacks in the rule of law, institutional capture, and systematic use of illicit financing to erode freedoms and weaken public trust. In this scenario, the boundaries between legal and illegal are blurred, while authoritarian actors and corrupt networks take advantage of institutional gaps and democratic fragility.

Drawing on the experience of its regional and national projects, this session offers a strategic perspective on how integrity, understood as a principle, practice, and collective action, can serve as a democratic shield. International cooperation, public institutions, civil society, the private sector, and independent journalism are emerging as key actors in defending democracy against illicit power and disinformation.

The session aims to analyze the factors driving democratic deterioration in Latin America and highlight specific experiences, with integrity as a central theme, that have succeeded in strengthening accountability and protecting fundamental rights and freedoms through multi-stakeholder and multilateral cooperation.

The session also aims to identify innovative and replicable strategies, promoted by German cooperation and its regional partners, that contribute to rebuilding trust, strengthening democratic resilience, and promoting collective action to defend democracy against corruption.

Who Benefits from Opaque Debt?

As democratic backsliding deepens, limited transparency and accountability in debt fuels misuse and corruption. Autocratic regimes divert loans for patronage and personal enrichment, jeopardising future generations TI, IMF, Denmark, NDI, WFD and EURODAD will explore reforms to IFIs, to lending and borrowing, and offer practical recommendations to strengthen anticorruption safeguards in debt

After the U.S. Mid-Term Elections, What's Next?

Under single party leadership in 2025, the world’s largest economy and military power have wreaked havoc on anticorruption progress, including the undermining of checks on dirty money, withdrawal from multilateral anticorruption platforms, gross misuse of sanctions, and the normalization of corruption as common practice. Will the U.S. election provide new opportunity to counter executive actions?

What Kind of Democracy are We Talking about When We Talk about Democracy in the Americas Today?

The panel aims to analyze the current state of democracy in the Americas through a comparative exchange among specialists from different countries, in order to identify regional trends, common patterns, and national particularities. It will examine how democratic institutions are functioning today, their main strengths and weaknesses, and how factors such as corruption, lack of public integrity, erosion of institutional checks and balances, and citizen distrust are affecting their performance. Particular attention will be given to the situations in Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and the Northern Triangle of Central America, where democratic institutions have come under increasing strain in recent years. These cases will serve as focal points for exploring broader regional dynamics, illustrating both shared challenges and country-specific developments. The dialogue will also seek to recognize emerging risks, evaluate institutional and social responses to these challenges, and place each country’s recent trajectory within a shared regional framework. The panel’s participatory format will also allow for questions and reflections from the audience, enriching the analysis with diverse perspectives.

The panel is expected to generate a comparative and up-to-date analysis of the state of democracy in the region, identifying both worrying trends and resilient or innovative experiences. The exchange will seek to identify the main challenges facing democratic systems in the Americas, especially regarding institutional governance, public integrity, and the fight against corruption, while also highlighting lessons learned and potential courses of action. Furthermore, the discussion aims to strengthen regional dialogue, generating useful analytical input for future cooperation initiatives. This conversation also builds on and follows up on discussions developed during previous regional meetings of the International Anti-Corruption Conference in the Americas (Bogotá 2024), ensuring continuity and contributing substantive input to ongoing and future regional exchanges.

Cracking Open Capture: Turning Political Windows into Lasting Change

State capture thrives where civic space shrinks and democratic institutions weaken. Yet moments of political opening create rare opportunities for reform. This interactive workshop brings together researchers, reformers, journalists, international organisations and civil society leaders to explore how civic resistance can evolve into durable institutional change, and how reform coalitions can withstand backlash once the window opens. Participants will co-create the Punta Cana Principles on Countering State Capture.