API will challenge CEC decision in court

The Independent Press Association (API) says it will challenge the Central Election Commission’s decision of March 3, which says that the Communist Party of Moldova (PCRM) was disfavored in an article published in the February 13 issue of the supplement “Obiectiv” (“Objective”) printed by the API, Info-Prim Neo reports. By 6 votes of 9, the members of the CEC upheld the decision of the Chisinau District Electoral Council No. 1 of February 20. The PCRM says that the article is detrimental to it because it negatively describes and analyzes its electoral platform of 2005. The API says that the material has an educative character. The PCRM also disputed the fact that the supplement “Obiectiv” is published from foreign financial resources. To support the executive director of the API Petru Macovei, one of the CEC members Mihai Busuleac said that the decision adopted by the CEC is not correct, also because the first page of the publication says that the opinions expressed in the newspaper do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of the person or company that finances the project. Pavel Midrigan, another member of the CEC, said that electoral education does not mean electoral campaigning. “It is not the business of an NGO to say what a political party did or did not. An NGO has another purpose,” he said. At the CEC’s meeting, Petru Macovei said that the supplement is published as part of an extensive campaign aimed at educating the electorate and that the money allocated for the project will be used for other activities as well. “We consider that electoral education includes analyses of the electoral programs of a party,” Macovei said, mentioning that only this way a voter will be really informed. He said that the CEC decision violates the right to free expression, which, according to him, is the most important right in any democratic society. Petru Macovei also said that the CEC acts counter to its principles when it says that the regulations concerning the covering of the election campaign by the mass media were infringed because “Obiectiv” is not a periodical. The API director said that the two institutions made the decisions in accordance with their own political sympathies rather than the law. He added that the promises of other parties will be also analyzed regardless of the so-called warnings designed to limit the freedom of the press in Moldova, stressing that the CEC’s decision will not affect the financing of the project launched by Coalition-2009, which includes the API. The supplement Obiectiv is published in a project funded by the international organization “National Endowment for Democracy”.