We’re excited to announce the launch of EUCAL — the EU Compass on Anti-Corruption Law — a new data platform developed thanks to the unprecedented cooperation between the Department of Law and the Department of Political Science at LUISS Guido Carli and the Department of Political Science at the University of Pisa, within the BridgeGap team.
The project team was led by Prof. Antonio Gullo (LUISS Guido Carli), Professor of Criminal Law and Dean of the Undergraduate School, together with, from the University of Pisa, Salvatore Sberna, Scientific Lead of Work Package 8, and Manoel Gehrke; and, from LUISS Guido Carli, Iva Parvanova and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Principal Investigator of the BridgeGap project.
What is EUCAL?
EUCAL is a comprehensive data platform presenting quantitative and qualitative assessments of anti-corruption criminal law frameworks across European countries. It offers comparable data on the criminalisation of corruption-related offences, sanctioning regimes, enforcement provisions, and the key legal elements that can limit criminal liability.
Our mission is simple: to give researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and civil society accessible, high-quality data on anti-corruption criminal law — data that can inform better legislation, sharper analysis, and more effective advocacy.
Where does EUCAL Come From?
EUCAL builds on the methodology of established projects like EuroPAM (European Public Accountability Mechanisms), adapting a proven approach to the specific features of anti-corruption criminal law.
The platform offers interactive dashboards, country profiles, and data visualizations designed to make complex accountability data easy to explore and act on.
How the Data Is Built: Our Methodology
At the heart of EUCAL is a simple but powerful question: how closely does each country’s law match what the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) calls for?
The EUCAL dataset answers this systematically, scoring national legal frameworks against the Convention’s standards and documenting the legal basis behind every assessment.
Every legal 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, along with procedural mechanisms such as precautionary measures, plea-bargaining, and witness and victim protection, including jurisdiction rules and asset recovery regimes.
- Legal Standards and Criminal Liability Boundaries — the rules that define where liability begins and ends, including definitions of public officials, statutes of limitations, and immunities.
The first two dimensions assess each corruption offence individually; the last two evaluate the anti-corruption system as a whole.
Scoring and Aggregation
Built on an original questionnaire, every question is answered Yes or No, supported by an explanatory note and the specific legal provision(s) behind it:
- Where national law meets the UNCAC 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 — using only the questions concerning elements specifically addressed in UNCAC. 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 offer a clear, comparable, evidence-based picture of how well national legislation aligns with international anti-corruption standards. Explanations and legal references accompany each question where appropriate, and full details of the coding rules and aggregation method are available in our complete methodological document.
A Living Dataset
EUCAL is a living resource. The dataset remains subject to updates and review to reflect legislative developments and ongoing quality-control checks — and we welcome your help. If you spot inaccuracies, missing information, or relevant legislative developments, please let us know.
Explore EUCAL
We invite researchers, policymakers, journalists, and civil society organizations to explore the platform, dive into the country profiles, and use the data to strengthen anti-corruption work across Europe.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to expand and refine the dataset.