LADOM urges senior authorities to pay for using administrative resources

The League for the Defense of Human Rights of Moldova (LADOM) recommends President Vladimir Voronin, Prime Minister Zinaida Greceanii and Head of Parliament Marian Lupu to pay back the money spent on the trips made for electoral purposes (the three officials run for MP on behalf of the Communist Party) and transfer it to the state budget from the PCRM’s election fund, Info-Prim Neo reports. At a news conference held on Wednesday to present the third election monitoring report prepared as part of the Coalition 2009 Project, the League’s president Paul Strutzescu said that as the officials use the administrative resources, they should pay for them because they use in fact public money. “Therefore, the principle of equity between the election contenders is not respected,” Strutzescu said. LADOM also calls on the MPs “to refrain from using administrative resources in the campaign.” A number of violations of the legislation, abuses by the police and problems caused by the imperfect election legislation have been recorded since the start of the election campaign. During the monitoring period (January 28 – February 24), several meetings of the election runners with voters have been hindered. At the same time, the voters attending the meetings held by the senior authorities are intimidated. They are obliged to put their signatures on registration lists or are brought to the meeting halls in an organized way. Such attempts compromise the holding of a competitive campaign and leave room for abuses and broad use of administrative resources, Paul Strutzescu said. According to Strutzescu, the election contenders do not have much time for campaigning until the April 5 elections. The League’s president also criticized the regulations concerning the covering of the election campaign by mass media, which say that the election debates can be held only after all the contenders are registered. “By understanding, a contender can be registered on the last hundred meters and the rights of those that have been already registered are thus limited,” Strutzescu stressed. He also said that about 20% of the Moldovan people with the right to vote are deprived of this right by the authorities’ refusal to set up additional polling places abroad. Paul Strutzescu considers that the Parliament should give the Central Election Commission more rights so that it could order the opening of additional polling stations at embassies. According to the LADOM expert Ion Creanga, the mechanism allowing every citizen to choose the place where to vote worked out by the CEC is also defective as it was ascertained that the local public authorities do not know how to include or strike off the persons that asked for the voting place to be changed. Among the irregularities identified by LADOM are: the blocking of the Chisinau City Hall’s accounts, the use of administrative resources, including by Opposition parties, intimidation acts and use of violence, hostile language and calumnious statements against the election runners. The organization calls on the CEC to carry out a campaign and inform the population about the importance of putting the “Elections 05.04.09” stamp in the loose leaf accompanying the identity card, and better inform the Transnistrian residents about the voting procedure and place. Coalition 2009 was founded by a group of nongovernmental organizations, namely the Association for Participative Democracy, Contact Center, LADOM, the Association for the Promotion of Moldovan Legal Clinics, the National Youth Council of Moldova, the Independent Journalism Center and the Association of Independent Press. Each of them publishes monitoring reports on the pre-election period and election campaign for the 2009 legislative elections.