Afghan Biographies

Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation


Name Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation
Ethnic backgr.
Date of birth
Function/Grade Background Names Chairman MEC
History and Biodata

Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC)

Head of Monitoring and Evaluation Committee MEC:
Mohammed Yasin Osmani,
Chairman of the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee:
Yama Turabi Yama Torabi (Director of the special secretariat for anti-corruption) (20160802, 20180515)
MEC Chairman Bari Salam (20190226)

CEO of the committee:

Nasim Akbar (20160607)

Head of media and public affairs department of MEC:

Mudasir Islami (20200626)

Other names Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee:
Ahmad Rashid Behroz, Independent Join Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC) secretariat head; Ahmad Rashid Behroz Ahmad Rashed Behroz (20150220, 20150603, 20151116)

Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC)
Kabul, Afghanistan
Phone: +93 797 51 58 71; +93 792 04 33 74
Email: contact [@] mec.af


Background:

Eighteen months after HOOAC was formed, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction issued a damning report highlighting the office's flaws. It was understaffed, lacked independence and had insufficient power to pursue cases, the report said. It added that employees lacked the basic skills to do their job.

Deeming the HOOAC a failure, the international community pressed Karzai to set up a corruption commission. Instead, what emerged was the monitoring and evaluation committee (MEC), partly funded by the UK's Department for International Development.

Karzai immediately doomed the MEC by appointing Professor Mohammed Yasin Osmani as its head. He had been the chairman of the HOOAC, which under his tenure had got nowhere. "It was a real kick in the teeth for internationals and signalled Karzai had no intention of going after those who were corrupt," the rule of law official said.

To add insult to injury, Karzai appointed Azizullah Lodin, the former head of the international election committee who had been fired over the 2009 election fraud, as the new head of the HOOAC. Karzai is reluctant to go after corrupt warlords and officials close to him because, having become president without a power base, he has had to cut deals with them to shore up his position.(20110719)
 

The Committee as of 20190226 consists of six senior anti-corruption experts selected through a nomination process overseen by the international community and the Afghan government. The Chairmanship of the Committee alternates between an Afghan and an international appointee every six months.

Helena Malikyar,

Ms. Helena Malikyar has worked on Afghan state building and political development as an  academic, practitioner and participant for over two decades. While her scholarly research was focused on the history of state building and modernization in Afghanistan, her work since 2001 has ranged from center-periphery relations to sub-national public sector capacity building and a number of development projects for international organizations such as the UNDP, UNAMA and USAID. In addition to her earlier works published in scholarly journals, in recent years, Ms.

Malikyar has been writing analytical articles on topics related to Afghanistan’s current affairs for Al-Jazeera, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a number of other news media websites.  She is an ABD, holding a master’s degree in Middle East and Islamic Studies from New York University. She has a bachelor’s degree in the same field from the University of Arizona.

Javed Noorani,

Mr. Javed Noorani has been one of the leading civil society activists advocating transparency and accountability on a range of issues in the Afghan mining sector. He has extensive experience in designing large-scale surveys and research assessment projects, and he has a lengthy list of published papers. Mr. Noorani currently is the lead author for the next UNDP Human Development Report. He has worked on major research assignments with different local and international consulting firms in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan in areas such as governance, security, development, conflict and natural resources. He earned a master’s degree in Conflict Analysis and Peace-Building and a Diploma in Conflict Analysis and Peace-building, both from the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Shri Ram College of Commerce in New Delhi.

Barry Salaam

Mr. Barry Salaam was appointed by the President as a member of the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC) in October 2017. He currently serves as the Chairman of the Committee.

A journalist, human rights activist and entrepreneur, Mr. Salaam was born in Badakhshan in 1978. He received his BA in Persian literature from Kabul University and has earned his master degree in International Relations from the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has been awarded several prestigious communications and leadership fellowships in the US, UK, and Germany.

Mr. Salaam has 19 years of experience in communications, media management, civil society activism, and anti-corruption. He served as a News AttacheĢ to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul from 1996 to 2001. In 2001-2002, he was communications officer at the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees (DACAAR). His media experience includes founding of Good Morning Afghanistan Radio in 2002, the country’s first public service broadcasting service, NAW MEDIA Production Company and establishment of 7 TV network in 2010. For the last 3 years, Mr. Salaam has also been the President of the Organization of Afghan Alumni (OAA), a network of over 500 alumni who have attended various US-sponsored educational and exchange programs.

As a well-known civil society activist, Mr. Salaam has participated in more than 50 international conferences promoting free media, women’s rights, development and security in Afghanistan and was elected by his peers to be the civil society speaker both at the 2014 London Conference on Afghanistan and at the Bonn Conference in 2011. He has organized and led massive civil society campaigns including the Farkhunda Rally and the demonstrations in defense of victims of Paghman sexual assault. Over the last decade, Barry Salaam has contributed to founding and strengthening numerous major civil society organizations and networks including the 120-member Civil Society & Human Rights Network (CSHRN), Afghan National Journalists Union (ANJU), Journalists Safety Committee, and Civil Society Joint Working Group.

Matthew H. Murray, Esq.(New Committee member)
Matthew Murray was appointed by President Ashraf Ghani as the new International Member of the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee of Afghanistan in December 2017. In January 2017, Mr. Murray completed a 5-year appointment to the Obama Administration, in which he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at the Department of Commerce and Senior Advisor on Governance and the Rule of Law at the Agency for International Development.

Throughout his career, Mr. Murray has worked at the intersection of U.S. foreign policy, international law, commerce, and political economy. In 1988, after graduating from Columbia University with a joint degree in law and international affairs, he helped Baker & McKenzie start one of the first commercial legal practices in the Soviet Union and create an office in Moscow. After the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, he started his own company, Sovereign Ventures, Inc., to advise companies, government agencies and multilateral organizations in Russia/Eurasia on how to counter systemic corruption risk.

In 2000, Mr. Murray co-founded the Center for Business Ethics & Corporate Governance, an NGO that engaged Russian and U.S. government agencies, multilateral organizations, and private sector and civil society leaders in public-private initiatives to create building blocks of a market economy. In 2007, he was hired by TNK-BP Management Ltd. (then the third largest oil and gas producer in Russia), in a new role as Corruption Risk Manager to lead a corporate policy initiative to create an anti-corruption compliance system based on the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Mr. Murray’s work in the field of political economy includes writing, guest lectures and congressional testimony on how to integrate anti-corruption principles into U.S. national security policy. From 2011-2015, he worked with the Brookings Institution to help launch the World Forum on Governance and co-author a research paper, Freedom from Official Corruption as a Human Right (Published January 2015).

Lorenzo Delesgues, (New Committee member)

Mr. Lorenzo Delesgues was appointed by President Ashraf Ghani as the new International Member of the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee of Afghanistan in March 2018.

Mr. Lorenzo, lived for 10 years in Afghanistan where he cofounded, at the age of 25, Integrity Watch, the leading anti-corruption organization in the country, which he directed from 2006 to 2011. That’s where he realized the power of social design to fight corruption, conducting pioneering social audits in post-conflicts environments, launching the Community Based Monitoring.
In 2012, back in France and dreaming to apply these approaches to the western context, he started to design Voxmapp, awarded innovation of the year 2016 by the French Salon of Mayors. He applies social design to connect citizens and the state with the objective to make public space shaping a pleasure.

Mr. Lorenzo is teaching at Sciences Po Paris a class on "accountability and Transparency in post-conflict environments" and at the design school Ecole Camondo a class on "sociology and anthropology applied to design and architecture" to share experiences and to get inspiration.

Michael E. Hartmann, (New Committee member)

Dr. Michael E. Hartmann was appointed by President Ashraf Ghani as the new International Member of the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee of Afghanistan in March 2018.

Mr. Hartmann was the Director, Rule of Law, of the United Nation Assistance Mission for Afghanistan (UNAMA) from 2013 to June 2017, and worked as UNODC’s International Anti-Corruption consultant at the Anti-Corruption Justice Centre (ACJC) of Afghanistan from November to December 2017. He led UNAMA’s advocacy and technical assistance to the Ministry of Justice’s Taqnin Department resulting in the 2017 Penal Code’s incorporation of all UN Convention on Corruption (UNCAC) mandated crimes and significant optional crimes, and all Rome Statute crimes.

In Afghanistan he was UNODC’s Criminal Justice Program Manager during 2008 to 2010. His first Afghan position was as the Advisor to the Attorney General of Afghanistan for US State/INL Bureau-JSSP (2005-2007), for a total of ten years in Kabul. He has testified as an expert on Afghan criminal law, procedure, and the constitution before the UK’s Royal Courts of Justice; the court relied upon his expert opinion against opposing experts.

Mr. Hartmann’s international prosecution work, including investigation, trial and appellate advocacy within national courts included being the Senior Crown Prosecutor/war crimes coordinator for Australia’s Solomon Islands RAMSI mission (2012-13, and being appointed as the first UNMIK international prosecutor for Kosovo (2000-2005). In Bosnia for three years (1997-2000), he was team leader, UNMIBH's Judicial System Assessment Program, Country Representative for UNODC’s anticorruption project in 1998-2000, and in 1997 advised the Ministry of. In 1996 he was the Senior Fulbright Scholar, Law, in Pakistan, at the University of the Punjab Law College in Lahore.

Mr. Hartmann’s writing includes book chapters such as Corruption as a New Threat and Hybrid Justice Institutions as the Antidote, a chapter in NATO Stability Policing: A Tool to Project Stability; International Judges and Prosecutors, a chapter in Combating Criminalized Power Structures: A Toolkit, Edited by Michael Dziedzic; Casualties of Myopia: Rule of Law and Impunity Lessons Not Learned, and co-author of Lost in Translation: Legal Transplants without Consensus-Based Adaptation, in The Rule of Law in Afghanistan: Missing in Inaction, Edited by Whit Mason. He co-authored two chapters in: Fighting Serious Crimes: Strategies and Tactics for Conflict-Affected Societies.

Mr. Hartmann is now an Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco, in an independent special prosecution unit investigating and prosecuting police abuses of power such as illegal officer-involved shootings, excessive use of force, and illegal deaths in custody.

 



The members of the Committee as of 20140112:

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    Mr. Drago Kos (Slovenia)

    Former Chair of the Council of Europe's Group of States against Corruption

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    Mr. Mohammad Yasin Osmani (Afghanistan)

    Advisor to the President and former Director of HOO

  •  

    Mrs. Eva Joly (France/Norway)

    Member of the European Parliament and initiator of the Paris Declaration Against Corruption

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    Mr. Zakem Shah (Afghanistan)

    Advisor to the President and former Minister of Commerce

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    Lt. Gen Hasan Mashhud Chowdhury (Bangladesh)

    Former Anti-Corruption Commission Chair

  •  

    Dr. Yama Torabi (Afghanistan)

    Founder and Executive Director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan
     

 

Background:
President Karzai Wednesday 20101229 named Mohammed Yasin Osmani, chief of the High Office of Oversight HOOAC, to the Monitoring and Evaluation Committee. The committee consists of six members including three national and three international and soon will begin to gauge aid spending in every organisation. A number of Afghan senators are doubtful about the committee efforts to stop corruption in government systems. "It would not be effective at all, but killing another amount of money," said an Afghan senator.

 

MEC was created in March 2010 by Presidential Decree 61 after the need for independent monitoring and evaluation of anti-corruption efforts was identified at a series of international conferences (London, Kabul).  Following the London Conference, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan invited the international community to form a joint Afghan-International monitoring and evaluation committee to provide policy advice and monitor and evaluate progress against specific benchmarks, which was welcomed by the international community gathered at the London Conference.

 

MEC is supported by a permanent secretariat in Kabul comprised of national and international individuals.  The Secretariat is divided into three pillars (Governance, Prevention, and Law Enforcement) consisting of an international expert, a national adviser, and a national officer with technical expertise crossing the three areas provided by a Senior Policy Advisor.  

MEC’s operations and strategic framework are primarily based around quarterly Committee visits to Afghanistan.  Six MEC missions have been held in Afghanistan since MEC’s inception and MEC members have visited the provinces of Parwan, Herat, and Balkh.  MEC members have broad authority to determine the Committee’s quarterly agenda, but these include the following four areas:

1-      Issuing recommendations and setting benchmarks;

2-      Monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the benchmarks;

3-      Policy advisory and advocacy for further progress; and

4-      Reviewing effectiveness of international assistance.

 

The Committee

According to its terms of reference, MEC is comprised of six senior anti-corruption experts, with three members appointed on the recommendation of the Government of Afghanistan and three on the recommendation of the international community.

The memberships as of 2012 of the Committee are:

 

Afghan Appointees                                                             International Appointees

Mohammad Yasin Osmani                                                       Drago Kos (Slovenia)

His Excellency Zakem Shah                                                   Eva Joly (France/Norway)

Dr. Yama Torabi                               Lt Gen. Hasan Mashhud Chowdhury (Bangladesh)
 

The Chair of the Committee alternates between an Afghanistan and international appointee on a six-month basis.  The current Chairperson is Mohammad Yasin Osmani who will chair the Committee until October 2012. 
 

MEC Secretariat

MEC is supported by a technical secretariat in Kabul comprised of national and international individuals who support the work of the Committee; develop procedures for the identification, drafting and monitoring of the MEC benchmarks; and maintain an in-country presence for MEC’s on-going anti-corruption efforts. 

The Secretariat is led by an Executive Director and is divided into three pillars (Governance, Prevention, and Law Enforcement) consisting of an international expert, a national advisor, and a national officer.  Technical expertise is provided by a Senior Policy Adviser who is responsible for guiding the technical work of the Secretariat’s units and providing technical advice to the Committee.   The Secretariat works closely with the parties implicated by the recommendations and benchmarks to ensure that they are implemented. 

The Executive Director was appointed in August 2011, and the Secretariat was substantially staffed with international experts and national advisors and officers under the three pillars by May 2012.  The practice of appointment of the Secretariat staff is handled through the Executive Director and senior staff is approved by the Committee.  There are currently vacancies at the law enforcement and prevention expert level.  Recruitment is ongoing and these positions will be filled in the near future.

Last Modified 2020-06-26
Established 2010-12-12