Unresolved matter of state and political advertizing

Transparency – Serbia (official chapter of Transparency International) warns that problems related to political and other hidden influences to media cannot be properly resolved until certain rules are adopted that will consistently regulate state and political advertizing in media.

These matters were not sufficiently and consistently regulated by media laws from 2014, Election Regulation and Public Procurement Law (2012). Document „Media Strategy“ from 2011, envisages advertizing of state organs without intermediates as an assistance to media, but it’s not known whether anything has been done accordingly. This problem was mentioned in the report of Anticorruption Council from the same year. These problems were not resolved with the adoption of regulations and amendments in the past four years, and not even by the Draft Law on Advertizing that was submitted to the National Assembly

Transparency – Serbia submitted recommendations and comments during the public debate on mentioned Draft law in February this year to Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunication. Unfortunately, Draft does not regulate advertizing of state organs and political parties, areas that have numerous problems. Positive legislation is not consistent when it comes to state and political advertizing, because one set of regulations are related to advertizing in electronic media and other to printed media. Besides, there are no clear measures for estimation of appropriateness of public sector advertizing.

Draft Law on Advertizing, that entered parliamentary procedure, regulates only the commercial advertizing without referring to these matters, and in regards to state and political advertizing, keeps the norms of the old Law on Advertizing (2005) that turned out to be insufficient in practice. To make the situation even more serious, if the current Draft law is adopted, there won’t be any legal bases for implementing the general rules on advertizing to state and political advertizing, like prohibition of discrimination, provoking the hatred, abuse of dependency relationship, indecent messages, causing fear and aggression with minors etc, as well as prohibition of discrimination of advertisers by the media.

Transparency – Serbia

Belgrade, 23 November 2015