Professor Rosalea Hamilton, co-chair of the Advocates Network, has deemed Jamaica’s unchanged ranking on the 2023 Corruption Perception Index as troubling.

“It is troubling that a majority of Jamaicans perceive our representatives in Parliament to be corrupt and that is very troubling, though I think we all need to do more to change this landscape. It’s unacceptable and its tending to become the norm,” Hamilton said.

Jamaica’s ranking on the 2023 CPI has remained unchanged for a second year, with the country securing a ranking of 69 out of 180 countries. It was also among the list of several other countries that scored below 50, with the country managing to secure a score of 44 out of 100.

According to Transparency International, a German non-governmental organisation that publishes the CPI index annually, over two-thirds of countries score below 50 out of 100, indicating that some countries have a serious corruption problem.

The CPI ranks 180 countries and territories around the globe by their perceived levels of public-sector corruption, scoring on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).

“The ranking is below the global average, which is unacceptable and the ranking shows that we are stagnated. We should be going in the direction of the climbing, that trend should be a declining trend in terms of the perception of corruption so people need to feel and know that corruption is on the decline and that is the trend we want to see. That trend of stagnation over the past few years is really unacceptable and we need to look closely at this problem, all of us,” Hamilton added.

She is urging Jamaicans to become a watchdog of corruption and report acts of corruption to the respective authorities.

“We have to continue to be outraged, we have to find corruption unacceptable and we all have to play our role in changing the status quo in terms of reporting when we see acts of corruption or we perceive there are acts of corruption. We need to report them to the agencies responsible for investigating these things so the Jamaican people need to do more. All of these things. We need to do more, our politicians need to more, our people of Jamaica needs to do more,” Hamilton added.

READ: Jamaica’s corruption perception unchanged in 2023 Corruption Perception Index