Abuse of the campaign “Prevention of Stroke” for the promotion of SNSD candidate

TI BiH informed Central Election Commission BiH (CEC BiH) that a campaign “Prevention of Stroke” which is being launched currently in RS and financed from public funds, is used for personal promotion of the Director of the University Clinical Center of RS (UCC RS) Vlado Dzajic, a candidate of SNSD for an MP of the National Assembly of RS (NARS), and thus making a non-permitted influence on voters.

Banja Luka, 7^thSeptember 2018 – Transparency International in Bosnia and Herzegovina (TI BiH) warns that the beginning of the election campaign again brought an unacceptable practice of the political parties to indirectly finance their promotion and promotion of their candidates by using funds belonging to the public institutions and enterprises.

In this regard, TI BiH informed the Central Election Commission of BiH that the campaign “Prevention of Stroke” in RS, financed from the public funds, is used to promote the Director of UCC RS, Vlado Dzajic, a candidate of SNSD for an MP of the NARS, on numerous billboards and posters which offer free medical examination to the pensioners. In this way the citizens are paying for the personal promotion of the candidate, and considering that this project offers free medical examination to the pensioners, it means the voters are being influenced in a non-permitted manner. The Law on Financing Political Parties does not allow the situations in which political parties are financed by public institutions or enterprises, or third parties, while the Election Law clearly forbids promising of monetary prizes or other benefits aimed at gaining voters’ support.

TI BiH reminds that public funds and institutions are not the property of political parties, and that no one has the right to abuse public resources for the political campaign. Therefore, TI BiH submitted a request to the UCC RS to provide information related to the total costs of the campaign “Prevention of Stroke” in which it participated in previous years, including the campaign “All under one roof” which takes place at the same time as the election campaign.

In this way TI BiH invites all relevant institutions to finally act, and to legally regulate and sanction the increasing practice of the ruling political parties to use public institutions and enterprises to finance promotion of political parties.

With the official start of the election campaign TI BiH started monitoring election campaign which includes monitoring 10 political parties in the media. Within this project, and in addition to the paid media advertisements, TI BiH will also monitor pre-election meetings and the activities of the officials in order to record potential abuses of public functions and institutions for the purpose of pre-election promotion.

Press rls 07_09_18_e