Updated: May 7, 2011
The issue of corruption will be the hardest hurdle to overcome on the road Serbia intends to travel toward becoming an EU member, says Vladimir Goati.
Goati, who heads Transparency Serbia, believes that this area has been "most neglected".
He, however, saw some progress in the fact that corruption was being increasingly discussed, along with its "metastases".
But, Goati warned, the co-called political corruption has not yet been addressed at all - not a single person in power or close to the ruling structures has been arrested for corruption.
"I feel that when people say, 'systemic corruption', they mean to say, big, or important corruption. This is in fact called political corruption and next to that stands small corruption, which tends to be huge in volume. However, no corruption is systemic. (It is) according to the importance we assign to it - but I do not see that it is in the system," Goati was quoted as saying.
Nenadić expects the law to bring improvements, but criticized some parts of the legislation as insufficiently specific, "thus leaving room for manipulation".
