24 August 2017 - UNODC welcomed Dr. Juanita Olaya on her first visit to the organization as the new chair of the UNCAC Coalition. The meeting between Jean-Luc Lemahieu (DPA Director), Mirella Dummar-Frahi (CST Team Leader) and Dr. Olaya was an opportunity to follow up on the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in June 2017 between the two organizations and discuss upcoming anti-corruption events.
Dr. Olaya was visiting Vienna with other colleagues from the UNCAC Coalition to chair an informal round table in preparation for the global forum on asset recovery that will take place in Washington DC from 6 to 7 December 2017.
Dr. Olaya has over 20 years of experience in the areas of good governance and anti-corruption. In addition to being newly appointed as chair of the UNCAC Coalition, she is a board member of Integrity Watch Afghanistan, a member of Transparency International Germany, and was a council member at the World Economic Forum of the "Benchmarking Progress in Society's Global Council".
UNODC and the UNCAC Coalition are collaborating on an upcoming multi-stakeholder workshop to be held in Sarajevo from 25 to 27 September 2017, and civil society organizations' (CSOs) participation at the seventh session of the Conference of the State Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (COSP7), which will take place in Vienna from 6 to 10 November 2017.
The UNCAC Coalition is a global network of over 350 CSOs that work closely with UNODC to promote the ratification, implementation and monitoring of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC); the need for participation of civil society and the importance of access to information are explicitly recognised in Article 13 of the convention.