The world is becoming increasingly intolerant to silence on global corruption and the impact of discontent is being felt from Egypt to Turkey to Brazil, new research by Transparency International indicates.

Nearly half of the 114,000 people surveyed in 107 nations believe dishonesty is worse now than it was two years ago, according to the civil society organization’s annual Global Corruption Barometer, released Tuesday.

One in four surveyed reported they have been forced to pay a bribe when dealing with public officials or organizations in the past year. Sierra Leone and Liberia were among the worst countries for the frequency of illegal payouts, while Canada, Croatia and Australia were among the best.

Data from some countries, including Russia, China and Brazil, were not included in the bribery report.

Financial dishonesty and government abuse touches many — from the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed 1,129 people, to women in Zimbabwe hospitals who are forced to pay $5 every time they scream while giving birth, the report said.

For the world’s poor, paying bribes to corrupt officials infringes on their basic rights and can mean the difference between health and hunger, school fees or shoes.

But people are tired from years of secrecy and dishonesty from businesses, government, police and the media, and they are increasingly standing up to support their rights, said Janet Keeping, president of Transparency International Canada. She pointed to recent anti-government protests in Brazil, Turkey and Egypt.

“People are freaking fed up. I think that is a good sign,” Keeping said from Calgary. “While I don’t like to see violence, I think it (protest) is a natural accompaniment to a stronger sense of human rights. People are feeling empowered as citizens are thinking, ‘You shouldn’t be allowed to do that to me.’

“People are beginning to understand they have human rights, that they should have stronger rights as citizens, that people in government and public institutions who are corrupt are ripping them off.”

Citizen action can lead to the exposure of corrupt acts, the sanctioning of officials and action from governments, noted the report. For example, public outrage has led to stronger transparency laws concerning the actions of oil and natural resource companies, said Charmian Gooch, a founding director of the advocacy group Global Witness. Gooch spoke last month at the TED Global Conference in Edinburgh.

In 1999, Gooch recalled, Global Witness began pushing to make public the backroom deals or cash payouts made by oil and resource companies to government officials. She said they were laughed at and called naive.

Now, transparency laws are fast becoming “the norm and the law,” she said.

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However, there is still a long way to go. Anonymous shell companies and secrecy in the international financial system and in the oil, gas and mining sector continues to cost developing nations billions of dollars every year, she said.

Shell companies are used to “steal” huge sums of money from poor countries and it is sometimes impossible to find out who is really behind the deals, she said in Edinburgh. A recent World Bank study looked at 200 cases of corruption and found that in 70 per cent of those cases, shell companies were used, with a price tag of $56 billion.

Many of these companies are in the United States and the United Kingdom. “This isn’t just an offshore problem. It is an onshore problem, too,” she said.

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