Roundtable “Public Policy and Geopolitics for Parliamentarians”
In mid-December 2025, the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption (GOPAC) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) successfully held the Roundtable “Public Policy and Geopolitics for Parliamentarians.”
The event was marked by the participation of H.E. Dr. Ali Bin Fetais Al-Marri, Chairman of GOPAC, Member of the Shura Council (2022–2025) of the State of Qatar, and Member of the Board of Trustees of UNITAR, alongside Dr. Firas Alhadithi, Executive Director of GOPAC, as well as UNITAR representatives, and was attended by honourable parliamentarians from different regions.
The initiative aimed to analyse the role of parliamentarians in the public policy cycle, as well as to discuss geopolitical changes affecting their work, considering their decisions shape national stability and international engagement.
The lectures emphasized that, in a rapidly changing world marked by interconnected challenges, legislators need to understand global trends to develop well-informed and forward-looking legislation. It was further highlighted that strengthening this understanding enables them to anticipate risks, identify opportunities for cooperation, and ensure that domestic policies remain coherent, strategic, and responsive to citizens’ needs.
Likewise, this learning initiative was an opportunity for a special launch of the GOPAC-UNITAR, Global Training Platform “Parliamentarians Against Corruption”, available at https://www.unitar-gopac-learn.org. This tool brings together valuable resources to enhance understanding of corruption, its causes and impacts, as well as its linkages with a range of related topics.
The platform offers 21 online courses prepared by the partners, focused on anticorruption and its linkages with international law, human rights, sustainable development, technologies, women empowerment, whistleblowers, and other sources of information. This portfolio of courses aims to strengthen the work of parliamentarians in this domain, and to support the implementation of the UN Convention Against Corruption. These online tools are available in English, Arabic, French, and Spanish.
The Global Training Platform includes information on related websites, facts and figures, parliaments’ work and anticorruption from the Sustainable Development Goals perspective, videos - including recordings from the virtual roundtables held with GOPAC, available in English, Arabic and Spanish. This tool is suitable to all of those who want to strengthen their knowledge on anticorruption, in particular parliamentarians and related advisors. Further information about UNITAR’s Division for People’s work in this field is available at: https://unitar.org/sustainable-development-goals/people/our-portfolio/anticorruption.
Finally, participants reiterated their commitment to the fight against corruption, while underlining its linkages with capacity building.