More often than not, this money served only to prop up dictators, undermining democratic accountability.

He said it undermined "democratic accountability and respect for the law."

Such a change, however, would undermine local accountability, said Michael P. Forbes, the president of the Suffolk Nassau Chamber of Commerce at Huntington.

Far from making legislators more accountable, as the state contended, Judge Wilken said term limits "may undermine electoral accountability by reducing incentives for legislators to represent their districts."

But you fail to point out that this flaw is not present in most other forms of proportional representation - and thus give the mistaken impression that all such systems undermine direct accountability to voters.

While the Thatcher government has had a major policy aim of controlling public expenditure and has used the block-grant regime and rate-capping to that end, centrally imposed financial controls not only infringe the rights of elected councillors to determine local spending needs and priorities but also undermine accountability to local ratepayers.

He also opposed capping of local authorities, believing that it undermined local accountability.

The European Committee for Standardisation, for example, recently did work on the packaging of waste directive, which the press has described as "fundamentally flawed, undermines democratic accountability and fails to meet the demands of the directive or, for that matter, environmental protection".

"The lack of transparency regarding oil sector flows and external debt operations undermine the budgetary process and public accountability and hamper the formulation of public policies," the report says.