A/HRC/40/78 Board facilitated exchanges between the members of the Board on the nexus between corruption and human rights. A human rights-based approach emphasizing the role of principles, standards and mechanisms for the promotion and protection of human rights can be a valuable and complementary tool in the fight against corruption. Corruption is often perceived as a victimless crime, with the result that it is not as stigmatized and visible as other criminal activities, but it has very insidious and damaging effects. 29. A change in the way corruption is perceived and dealt with is crucial. A bottom-up approach to the fight against corruption based on human rights must be developed to strengthen popular support in this endeavour and to empower victims and make them visible. The link between the fight against corruption and human rights should be more systematically included in human rights education at all levels. Technology-based solutions can play an important role in this respect. Promoting gender equality is key, given the correlation showing that countries with higher levels of gender equality tend to have lower levels of corruption and considering how corruption impacts on women. The Chair of the Board stressed that from a human rights perspective, there is currently no need for additional standards for the fight against corruption; the focus should be to maximize the use of existing standards, including the human rights standards and mechanisms. 30. Mariclaire Acosta, a former member of the Board, participated in the discussions in her capacity as Chair of the National System against Corruption (Sistema Nacional Anticorrupción) in Mexico and shared her experience. Ms. Acosta stressed that corruption and the de facto impunity enjoyed by its perpetrators had caused huge damage, with many victims. It was a major factor in the weak rate of economic growth that many countries had experienced in the past decades. It had also affected and even distorted and thwarted democratic developments, producing a widespread lack of trust and confidence in government institutions at national, state and municipal levels. 31. Ms. Acosta described the efforts made in Mexico to establish a national anticorruption system as a means of preventing, detecting, investigating and punishing acts of corruption and strengthening the institutions charged with that task in the three branches of government, at both the federal and state levels. It was a State institution operated by the Government with direct civil society participation in its management. Ms. Acosta noted as a good practice that the system was presided over by a member of a special Citizen’s Committee composed of five citizen representatives. They were selected by a committee of leaders from academia, business and civil society and appointed by the Senate, and their periods in power were staggered in such a way that one member of the five was regularly replaced. In addition to setting policy, the Committee had an oversight function. It had the power to introduce issues relating to corruption to the Coordinating Committee (the principal component of the anti-corruption system) and to propose the main tenets of a national corruption policy and the instruments with which to measure its enforcement. Despite the important obstacles it still faced, the system had succeeded in integrating civil society into its structure and had provided it with a leadership role, and it was this feature that made it unique. 32. Carmen Rosa Villa referred to the differences in the impact of corruption between women and men, linked also to the unequal distribution of power. Corruption further reduced opportunities for all to access public resources, but for women the challenges were even greater, in view of the structural barriers that already existed, including in terms of access to information and decision-making positions and power. Lin Lim also highlighted the impact of corruption on impeding the growth of small and medium-sized businesses in various regions and in particular at the initial stages of fragile income-generation activities for women. 33. Corruption is a barrier both to development and to the full achievement of gender equality. Steps toward preventing corruption or promoting gender equality are therefore mutually beneficial. Issues such as education and the strengthening of national and international judicial systems, increasing equal political participation and continuing research represent areas where both fighting corruption and promoting equality can be mainstreamed and leveraged. The links between gender equality and corruption need to be central to the search for policies and practices to eradicate endemic corruption. Attacking 7