Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres (ALAC)

The Transparency International Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres (ALACs) in South Eastern Europe are places where victims and witnesses of corruption report cases and receive practical legal advice to enable them to file and pursue official complaints with the relevant national institutions. The ALACs motivate active involvement of citizens in the fight against corruption by providing simple, credible and viable mechanisms.

They are offering direct help in form of legal support while at the same time using information gained from citizen complaints to identify corruption-facilitating weaknesses in the system and to advocate for reform based on the concrete evidence of citizen’s complaints. ALACs are thereby functioning as mediator, enabling ordinary citizens to hold institutions accountable, translating their concerns into systematic improvements.

Apart from providing direct help in personal cases, ALACs have accomplished numerous advocacy successes, for example, valuable changes to anticorruption provisions of laws on public procurement (Serbia, Bosnia i Herzegovina); convincing several state institutions and authorities to provide an official directly in charge of handling citizen’s complaints (Bosnia i Herzegovina); ministries creating their own hotlines (Moldova); achieving actual access to information (if necessary through Supreme Court decision as in Montenegro). They also put citizen concerns on the government’s agenda, e.g. harmful effects of certain privatizations (Montenegro), even achieving corrections to previously conducted illegal actions as in the case of overspending in election campaigning in Serbia where political parties, after an ALAC-based campaign, ended up reimbursing the state budget.

Regional ALAC-s

ALAC PUBLICATION (serbian only)

Total Opened Cases In Period 2007-2010

Number Of Total Opened Cases in 2012