Grandstand. For a decade now, American compliance methods have taken a position in the legal landscape of European countries. Initially resulting from the regulation of financial markets and the control of operators such as telecoms, compliance seeks to preserve systems by anticipating the risks posed by companies. These organizational methods of anticipation where risk management relies a priori on the operator rather than a posteriori on its controller now extend to all fields of activity.
Even criminal law, however particularly codified, consecutive and regal, applies these methods to the business world in terms of corruption, money laundering and human rights violations. Thus, large companies are now required to set up a mapping of their risks, an assessment of their partners and an internal alert system.
Faced with more technical, more international and more systemic issues, compliance proves to be more effective than the traditional policy of sanctioning infractions. The term “compliance” being insufficient to translate the reality of this new legal paradigm which proceeds by risk and by systems, it is the concept of “compliance” which has imposed itself, eloquent testimony to an acculturation.
An institutional singularity
The Vatican, as a State or by mission, has always appeared at the antipodes of this Anglo-Saxon culture of self-regulation of the business world, the recent encyclical Fratelli tutti by denouncing the limits, even the compromises. Conversely, as shown by the corruption index of Transparency Internationalthe countries of Protestant culture are traditionally more receptive to it, even finding in it one of the roots of the schism, including the denunciation of the trade in indulgences in the 16th century.and century offers an illustration.
Three factors may originally explain the Vatican’s distrust of these methods of regulation. First of all, its institutional singularity, the result of a historical balance, which justifies both the existence of this micro-State and its own organization, contrary to any organizational control, starting with the separation of powers. Then, his philosophy of the penalty stemming from canon law, which is intended to be more penitential than penal, based on individual commitment and sincere repentance. Finally, his traditional distrust of economic affairs, and more particularly of finance.
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