US district court senior judge Mark Wolf has spent his professional lifetime pursuing corruption.

He is visiting Australia and will speak in Sydney this week about his campaign to form an international anti-corruption court.

"I hope Australia's role will be to be a leader in establishing the court," Judge Wolf said.

"Columbia has become the first country to endorse the idea of the court … but Canada and Australia have always seemed to me to be leading candidates.

"They have been very good in the human rights arena and this is comparable in some respects to human rights issues."

The judge makes that comparison because the level of corruption he is talking about is not akin to someone pilfering pens from the office stationary cupboard.

He is talking about grand corruption.

"It's coming to be defined by myself and others as corruption committed by a nation's leaders, sometimes called kleptocrats, where they use their office for personal gain," Judge Wolf said.

"So grand corruption is essentially defined by the office held by the person who commits the crime."

Judge Wolf cites countries such as Angola, Turkey and Russia as exhibiting characteristics of grand corruption.

He said in some cases there was a link with terrorism — either as direct supporters, or the obstruction that corruption causes to international efforts to contain terrorism.

Corruption costing the world trillions

Judge Wolf said bribery cost the world economy trillions of dollars and that corrupt regimes routinely abused the human rights of their citizens.

Judge Wolf said Angola, Turkey and Russia exhibited characteristics of grand corruption. ( ABC News: Simon Royal )

"There's almost a complete correlation between the countries that have the most corrupt leadership and those that are most abusive of their citizens' human rights," he said.

"They [the leadership] control the police, the prosecutors and the courts and they won't permit the honest and effective prosecution and punishment of their friends, their families and themselves."

Judge Wolf conceded that should such an international court ever be established, compliance with its judgements by corrupt regimes would be an issue — to begin with.

"I think as these courts exist longer, a culture that you can't disobey a court order and that states do have to apprehend and turn people over will develop," he said.

"It's important to try and show people that the outside world is watching."

Kleptocrats a 'reflection of society'

Daniel Del Duca studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide — one of the institutions at which Judge Wolf spoke.

Daniel Del Duca believes corruption will continue due to the realities of society. ( ABC News: Simon Royal )

Originally from Argentina, Mr Del Duca said his country too has had its past entanglements with kleptocrats and corruption.

But Mr Del Duca had reservations about what an international court could achieve.

"You've got to understand how people in my country think," he said.

"The kleptocrats are a reflection of society, so we can have our international court that imprisons them but I can assure you that we'll have another one and another one and another one."

Curiously, Judge Wolf said his homeland did not support his idea.

"The United States would not support the court I'm proposing now … because the United States is retreating from its role internationally and there's an emphasis on national sovereignty," he said.

"A conservative thinktank said they agree with my reasoning, but not the idea of the court. That's an indication of what I'm talking about."

Nevertheless, the US has both the tradition of, and the institutions for, tackling official corruption.

A career launched during the Watergate scandal

Judge Wolf's career began during the most celebrated, or infamous, moment of the Watergate scandal of the early 70s.

Former US president Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 after it was revealed Republican operatives had broken into the Watergate Hotel to bug rooms used by their Democratic opponents.

Judge Wolfe was appointed special assistant to the US attorney-general in the last months of Mr Nixon's administration.

"With regard to Watergate, one of the gravest offences was the partisan use of the Department of Justice and its powers to prosecute … there's a difference between politics and partisanship," he said.

"If a president gets elected and would rather devote more resources to drug enforcement and fewer to civil rights, you can do that.

"But what you can't do is say the formidable prosecutorial powers of the United States should be used against my political adversaries, my enemies, as Nixon called them … and yes, that's what he did."

Judge Wolf said there had not been any "discernible efforts by the president to abuse the Department of Justice in a partisan manner" since Watergate.

"I did not think that, my experience, when I was 26, 27, 28, would be resonant again … but we are dealing with them and it's an open issue as to how well we will deal with them," he said.

He said one of the people he and his boss appointed during the Watergate era was a man he still held in high regard, Bob Mueller.

He is the special counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In the hyper-partisan world that has engulfed American politics, and the Trump administration in particular, Judge Wolf said Mr Mueller would follow the evidence and only the evidence.

"He will make decisions based on established standards and procedures, uninfluenced by whether it will help one party or person or hurt another party or person."

In other words, it's all the qualities the public, and a leader, should look for.