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A new report from the corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) claims that judicial corruption is undermining the rule of law across the globe.

Judicial corruption is a particular problem in the former Soviet republics in eastern and central Europe, and throughout much of Asia and Africa, according to a summary of the report in the Jurist, a publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Compounding the problem, some of the former Soviet satellites, while pushing various corruption reform measures, have failed to eradicate legacies of corrupt practices left over from communism. According to the Budapest Business Journal, some eastern and central European governments are attempting to remedy one such legacy — the mishandling of court papers — by redesigning justice buildings so that employees are more visible to other workers and to the public.

India’s judiciary received a scolding in the TI report, notes the Times of India, because of an estimated $580 million in bribes flowing to lower-level judges each year.

Bribery of the judiciary was also cited as a serious problem throughout much of Africa, reports the East African Standard of Nairobi, Kenya, which quotes one analyst observing a notion he says is widespread in Kenya: “Why hire a lawyer when you can pay a judge?”

TI’s report says that citizens in many nations feel they must pay bribes in order to gain access to the justice system at any level, a problem particularly acute in Albania, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico, Moldavia, Morocco, Peru, Taiwan, and Venezuela, according to the Caracas daily paper El Universal.

In the survey of 62 countries, 17 percent of respondents said they had bribed police officers to get away with offenses.