The media professionals want the Electoral Code to ensure a balance between the freedom of expression and the responsibility of all the media outlets, not only of media service providers. Better cooperation is wanted between the Central Election Commission (CEC) and the media, at least at the stage when the regulations concerning election campaign covering are drafted, which should be permanent and should not be adjusted every time there is an election campaign, Petru Macovei, executive director of the Association of Independent Press (API), stated in a videoconference titled “Electoral Coder Reform: Priorities and Intervention Areas” that was staged by the Institute for European Policies and Reforms (IPRE) in partnership with the Civic Coalition for Free and Fair Elections (CALC), with support from the Hanns Seidel Foundation, IPN reports.
Petru Macovei noted particular changes are needed to solve the existing problems. In the previous election campaign, problems related to the electoral debates were witnessed. The Electoral Code should be supplemented with a provision by which the media service providers will be allowed to decide the format, frequency and hour of broadcasting. The current obligation to hold debates during prime time only turned out to be counterproductive. Also, Article 70 should be supplemented with a provision by which such notions as “electoral audiovisual programs” would be introduced. The representatives of the media insist that the broadcasting of political advertising should be banned during the election campaign. The Electoral Code should specify the Audiovisual Council’s duties to weekly publish monitoring reports and to impose penalties.
The Audiovisuals Media Services Code should stipulate harsher penalties for the media service providers that violate the election covering principles, of 70,000 to 100,000 lei. There should be introduced provisions by which the media service providers that do not cover the election campaign and public media service providers should be banned from broadcasting electoral advertisements for money.
Igor Boțan, executive director of the Association for Participatory Democracy “ADEPT”, said the reformation of the electoral legislation in Moldova started in 1997. The new Electoral Code was based on an absolutely conservative approach on which foreign experts worked. The approach referred to the standardization of procedures so that different elections could be held, for example, simultaneously, or that the personnel involved in the electoral processes was trained in a particular way and didn’t need additional training when they pass from election to election. Then, the foreign experts set the goal of keeping the procedures introduced for the elections of 1990, 1994, 1995 and of avoiding innovations in the electoral sector until Moldova gained experience. Many years passed since then and this approach is already outdated.
Then, the CEC was formed of nine members, three of whom worked on a permanent basis and the explanation at that moment was that the financing of the Commission was a serious problem. Now this problem no longer exists. All the CEC members should have a permanent status and should focus on particular areas within the CEC. “I think time has come to leave the conservative approach aside and to adopt an innovative approach,” stated Boțan.
According to him, the citizens now cannot initiate referendums on their own initiative. 200,000 signatures needed to be collected to initiate a referendum. At district level, the figure was of 5,000 signatures and was then raised. Currently, it is impossible to collect sufficient signatures in districts owing to the absence of people and of voters in localities. This problem should be solved by interpretation or by amending the Constitution. During electoral periods, all the requests of the CEC to state institutions should be mandatory and these should take an attitude immediately.
