The current law on advertising contains confuse provisions and multiple shortcomings. In time it was amended 13 times, with 42 changes being made to it. A bill to replace the current law was presented in debates staged by the Independent Journalism Center on July 25. The Center’s executive director Nadine Gogu said the discussions will continue within the parliamentary working group that was set up to examine the bill, IPN reports.

“I hope the debates will produce a document that will be adopted in Parliament. A new law is needed because studies showed that the current law had been amended 13 times during the past 15 years and it would have been too many amendments if we had proposed new ones now. The current law contains shortcomings and confuse provisions that can be interpreted. Required provisions are absent, such as those on fair competition, especially in the mass media,” stated Nadine Gogu.

One of the bill authors Ion Bunduchi, media expert, said the authors want the bill to be of a high quality and better than the current law before it reaches Parliament. “Of the 34 articles of the law, 18 contain defective formulations that allow interpreting particular provisions. An interpretable legal norm should be polished so that everyone understands it appropriately,” noted the expert.

Ion Bunduchi also said the bill includes such notions as “online media”, “publicity distributor”, “temporary external advertisements” and “penetrating advertisements”. They suggest that all the electoral posters should be removed 24 hours before the elections. Political advertisements were also defined. These cannot contain congratulatory messages from a party on different occasions as it is not clear if this is an electoral message or a message of social interest.

Eugeniu Rybka, co-author of the bill, said the political advertisements, messages of public interest and commercials were the areas that needed to be regulated. The authors insisted on notions so as to reflect the relations existing between producers and consumers of advertisements. A lot of work was done on electoral publicity in the post-electoral period when congratulatory messages or invitations to concerts are disseminated on the occasion of religious holidays, but there are no legal regulations in this regard, which would define this type of publicity.