Jakarta. Indonesia wants to join the OECD’s convention that criminalizes bribery of foreign public officials in international business transactions.

Indonesia has been seeking to be part of the OECD, short for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The 38-member group brings together some of the world’s most developed economies such as the US, Canada, and the UK. Countries wishing to join the club must comply with OECD’s strict standards. To convince the OECD that it is worthy of a full-fledged membership, senior minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra gave its word that it would sign up to the decades-old convention that aimed to promote a level playing field for companies worldwide. This convention establishes legally binding standards, including having its signatories agree on making public official bribery a criminal offense.

“We reaffirm our commitment to global anti-corruption cooperation by expressing our willingness to accede to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, which we will subsequently ratify to integrate into our national legal system,” Yusril told an OECD forum in Paris on Wednesday local time, as revealed by the speech’s transcript given by his ministry.

Yusril did not say if Indonesia had set a deadline for the convention to be effective in the country. As of September 2024, 46 countries -- including 8 non-OECD members -- have ratified the convention. The OECD reported that over 500 entities have been sanctioned in high-profile cases since the convention’s inception in 1999. In a separate video statement received after the forum, Yusril claimed that Indonesia’s efforts to eradicate corruption had gained positive responses from the OECD members. 

“We [Indonesia] have achieved many things [in our fight against corruption], although there are many things that are far from satisfactory. For instance, we have yet made substantial progress on improving our Corruption Perceptions Index,” Yusril said.

Indonesia scored 37 in the 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, up by 3 points from the 2023 survey. The index scores countries by the perceived level of public corruption on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). The highest score that the Southeast Asian country has ever recorded was 40 in 2019. President Prabowo Subianto has often said that he would take a tough stance against corruption. The retired army general even floated a plan to build a remote island prison for the corruption convicts.

Indonesia expects that an OECD membership and the group’s stringent standards can catapult the country’s growth, even making it a high-income economy by its centennial in 2045. Jakarta officially became a candidate member to the OECD last year.