Methodology
How closely does each country's law match what the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) calls for? The EuCAL dataset answers that question systematically, scoring national legal frameworks against the Convention's standards and documenting the legal basis for every assessment.
Every framework is examined across four dimensions:- Coverage of Criminalisation: which corrupt offences the law actually reaches, and their scope of applicability;
- Sanctioning Regime: how each offence is punished, for both individuals and companies, and the factors that increase, reduce, or remove that punishment;
- Enforcement Authority and Provisions: the powers and bodies that make the law work and the procedural enforcement mechanisms (precautionary measures, plea-bargain mechanisms, measures to protect witnesses and victims), including jurisdiction rules and asset recovery regime;
- Legal Standards and Criminal Liability Boundaries: the rules that shape where liability begins and ends, including the definitions of public officials, statutes of limitations and immunities.
The first two dimensions look at each corruption offence individually; the last two assess the anti-corruption system as a whole.
Building on an original questionnaire, every question is answered Yes or No, supported by an explanatory note and the specific legal provision(s) behind it. Scoring reflects alignment with UNCAC: where the national law meets the standard, the item scores 1; where it does not, it scores 0.
These scores are aggregated into indicators, each calculated as the simple mean of the underlying questions. Only questions concerning elements specifically addressed in the UNCAC are used to build these measures. Country averages are then calculated as the mean across the four dimensions, while the European Union's indicators and overall score are the averages of its member states' scores. The result is a fulfilment index on a 0–100 scale: the higher the score, the closer a country's law comes to what the Convention calls for.
Together, these measures give a clear, comparable, evidence-based picture of the extent to which national legislation aligns with international anti-corruption standards. Explanations and legal references are provided, where appropriate, for each question, and full details of the coding rules and aggregation method are set out in the complete methodological document.
The dataset remains subject to updates and review to reflect legislative developments and ongoing quality-control checks. You can help us by reporting possible inaccuracies, missing information, or relevant legislative developments.