The constituent organizations of the Civic Initiative for a Clean Parliament (CICP) on www.moldovacurata.md published the first 45 profiles of candidates who will run in the parliamentary elections of February 24, 2019. Of these, 16 are candidates of the Party of Socialists, by 12 are candidates of the Democratic Party and the bloc ACUM, four are candidates of the Shor Party and one is the candidate of the Party of Communists. Also, 15 investigation articles about candidates with integrity problems were published on www.anticorupție.md.
In a news conference at IPN, executive director of the Association for Participatory Democracy ADEPT Igor Boțan said the candidates are examined by four organizations: Association for Participatory Democracy ADEPT, Association of Independent Press, Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Corruption and Journalistic Investigations Center. The used criteria are: integrity in political activity; integrity in the management of property and personal interests; integrity when holding public and party posts, and the records of punishment. The goal of the initiative is to promote the informed vote in the parliamentary elections and targets the voters, electoral contenders, parties and public institutions.
Journalistic Investigations Center president Cornelia Cozonac said two groups of journalists from a number of media outlets will be engaged in the given exercise. These will be chosen according to professionalism criteria. The profiles of candidates will be documented from open sources so as to see if the given persons committed violations and abuses, have criminal cases, etc. The profiles are also examined by a team of journalists of the Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Corruption. Besides the 15 already published profiles, the Journalistic Investigations Center works on 130 profiles. The monitoring is rather difficult as not all the public resources contain sufficient information.
“There are also problems related to the access to information. Particular authorities from whom we asked for information told us that these are personal data, even if it is about public persons. It is a pleasant exercise for us as we learned a lot about a person who aspires to a public post, about whom we didn’t know earlier,” stated Cornelia Cozonac.
According to Lilia Ioniță, expert of the Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Corruption, is to ensure the legal protection of all the partners of the initiative, to fact-check the profiles drawn up by journalists so that these are informative in character, do not contain value judgments and all the information could be substantiated.
Petru Macovei, president of the Independent Press Association, said the Civic Initiative for a Clean Parliament 2019 set the goal of supervising about 250 candidates or potential candidates. “We aim to publish the synthesis of information about 200 persons on the portal moldovacurata.md, while the Journalistic Investigations Center and the Association of Independent Press will make public the profiles of 75 persons with severe integrity problems before the start of the election campaign,” stated Petru Macovei.
The organizations that form part of the Civic Initiative for a Clean Parliament 2019 call on the citizens to signal eventual irregulars in the activity or behavior of electoral competitors. These signals will be additionally checked and documented by investigation journalists who will add new relevant data to the profiles if these turn out to be true.
The organizations that founded the Civic Initiative for a Clean Parliament 2019 also examined the candidates who ran in the parliamentary elections of 2009, 2010 and 2014.
