The foreign ministers of the three countries have backed a campaign for an anti-corruption tribunal, which supporters say should function similarly to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“Such a tribunal will provide the international community with an additional tool to enforce existing anti-corruption laws,” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra tweeted after a meeting in The Hague, a Dutch city home to a plethora of global tribunals.

According to the UN, around two trillion dollars in procurement expenditures are lost worldwide every year due to corruption.

Senior US judge Mark Wolf, who is leading the campaign, said the court would “focus on the highest officials and the people they bribed.”

“The anti-corruption culture starts at the top,” he said at a panel discussion on the sidelines of the ministerial meeting.

Some 189 parties, including 181 countries, have signed the UN Convention against Corruption, which aims to end corruption worldwide.

“Nevertheless, kleptocrats enjoy impunity because they control the administration of justice in the countries they govern,” said Wolf.

“This court could be a place where very courageous whistleblowers, for example, could give their testimony” when they couldn’t do it in the countries they live in, he added.

But supporters of the tribunal conceded that it still has a long way to go before it becomes a reality and will face challenges similar to those of the ICC.

For example, the ICC, established in 2002 to try the world’s worst atrocities, is unable to arrest suspects and relies on its member states to do so, with varying degrees of success.

“We want to look at what worked and what didn’t work and what the next steps might be,” said Maja Groff, senior contract adviser for Integrity Initiatives International, an NGO on the panel, at the origin of the call for the establishment of the anti-corruption court.