Civil society expresses its concern about the intention to adopt in a hurry the draft law on integrity. To avoid the risk of this bill being passed without coordination with the other laws and without a debate with civil society, a number of organizations demand to postpone the examination and adoption of this bill until the package of laws on integrity is made public, IPN reports.
“Even if we realize that the adoption of this bill is one of the priorities stipulated in the priority reform action roadmap that must be implemented by July 31, it is important to ensure the quality of the provisions of the new law, including in correlation with the package of laws on integrity that was already adopted by Parliament,” the civil society organizations say in their appeal.
The NGO note that the bill looks more like a deontological code or a code of conduct. The draft law actually brings together the already existing regulations and it’s not clear how it will contribute to achieving the set objective. The bill does not provide mechanisms for identifying and removing corruption risks and for penalizing public agents for manifestations of corruption.
As the public entities are the object of the bill, this could also refer to political parties. Given the aforementioned reasons, the signatories call on Parliament to postpone the examination and adoption of the draft law and to stage public consultations on it so that the opportunity and sufficiency of the initiative are thoroughly analyzed.
Among the signatories are the Association for Responsible and Efficient Governance, the Legal Resources Center of Moldova, the Institute for Public Policy, the Association “Promo-LEX”, Transparency International-Moldova, the Association of Independent Press, the Association for Participatory Democracy and the Journalistic Investigations Center.
