Useful recommendations for the improvement of legislation on party financing
Disclosing of incomes and expenses of candidates and parties, online, before the elections and preventing of the campaign costs to remain unpaid after the filing of the financial statements, are the main recommendations of the Slovenian expert Jurij Toplak, who analyzed the effects of the implementation of the Serbian Law on Financing of Political Activities. Transparency - Serbia (official chapter of Transparency International) calls on the Government to accept these recommendations, as soon as possible, and integrate them in the draft amendments to the Law.
Special importance of this analysis is the fact that it is envisaged by the Action Plan for Chapter 23 of negotiations between Serbia and the EU, as a document that should serve as a basis in the process of amending the Law on Financing of Political Activities. Recommendations of the EU expert largely coincide with those of Transparency Serbia from previous years that we also presented to the expert during his work on the analysis. At the same time, we regret that the above mentioned problems were not resolved within the past five years, since the current law was enacted, as the representatives of the ministries, parliamentary groups in the National Assembly and independent authorities were already familiar with them either directly from the analysis of TS, or the Anticorruption Agency pointed out to some of them in its reports submitted to the National Assembly or they were mentioned in the Anti-corruption strategy from 2013.
It is important to emphasize that ten recommendations covered some important issues and problems, but not all. The above-mentioned analysis is especially dedicated to sanctioning policy, while, for example, the question of "official's campaign," that is, abuse of public office and public resources in the campaign, was not mentioned. We remind that this issue, which has always been present in Serbia, became particularly important after the establishing of stricter rules on campaign financing, which was pointed out in the report on April elections by OSCE/ODIHR monitoring mission.
Transparency - Serbia
Belgrade, 13 September 2016
News
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