ERCAS is saddened by the passing of Jeremy Pope on August 29th. Pope was a key founder of the international anti-corruption movement, and made great contributions to bringing corruption to the top of the international agenda in the past two decades.
He was the founding Managing Director of Transparency International (TI) from 1994 to 1998 and later took the position of Executive Director of Transparency International’s London Office. He also authored one of Transparency International’s first source books, which remains the basis for the National Integrity Systems assessment methodology widely implemented by the organisation and its national chapters. According to TI founder Peter Eigen, “Jeremy Pope was indeed one of the intellectual fathers of Transparency International. He joined our organisation with a deep knowledge of institutions, how they should work, and the impact on society when they fail. He did help Transparency International develop pioneering ways to define and fight corruption”.
Ten years after the founding of TI, in 2003, Pope undertook another endeavour and created the organisation Tiri–Making Integrity Work with former colleague Fredrik Galtung, with the goal of taking the anti-corruption movement in a new direction towards an emphasis on pro-integrity initiatives. Galtung, current CEO of Tiri, reminds us that Pope was “one of the pillars, greatest innovators and forces for good in the international integrity and anti-corruption movement”.
Before his engagement in the fight against corruption, Pope was a civil rights and environmental lawyer in New Zealand. He also served at the Commonwealth Secretariat, where he was involved in efforts to abolish the death penalty, physical punishments of prisoners, and torture in several jurisdictions. In the past years, Jeremy Pope continued to pursue his long-time concern with the human rights issue as Commissioner on the New Zealand Human Rights Commission.
