By Protecting the Interests of Political Parties Legislators Allow Abuse

Banja Luka, 29^th March 2012 – Transparency International Bosnia and Herzegovina (TI BiH), in collaboration with the Open Society Fund, has published the Report on Monitoring the Financing of Political Parties in BiH for 2010 and 2011, which points to a number of deficiencies in the legal framework which regulates this area and its application, and to complete lack of willingness of legislators to improve the accountability and transparency of political parties.

The legal framework itself leaves great opportunities for abuses by political parties:

–        Nothing prevents circulation of unaccounted money flows, because there are no provisions obliging the use of single bank accounts.

–        There is no obligation to publish financial reports of the parties, which reduces access to their financing.

–        The legal framework fails to show the full picture of the financial movements relating to the political parties, because it contains no rules or restrictions related to expenses of political parties.

–        The Central Election Commission has limited capacity and jurisdiction, and it is not responsible for the audit of costs, nor does it have enough human resources to implement effective audit.

–        Low fines do not motivate the enforcement of regulations and, in some cases, such as the financing of campaigns, it ‘’pays off’’ to break the law.

Although, the Interdepartmental Working Group on Amendments to the Law on Financing of Political Parties has been formed, the activities in the field of the amendments to the law have been directed towards its weakening, and providing more opportunities for inappropriate influence on the activities of political parties, to which public has already been warned by TI BiH. On the other side, the lack of consensus within the Interdepartmental Working Group and suggestions of its members, have shown that their top priority is to preserve the interests of political parties, ignoring recommendations submitted by the TI BiH, the OSCE and Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), which would enable stronger supervision and greater transparency in financing of political parties. Even though international institutions have warned that the funding of the political parties must be done more transparently, and that there must be control over the funds received from the budget, the proposals have been ignored by the Working Group while trying to increase the limits on donations to parties, and legalize certain sources of income, which have been illegal until now.

This weak legal framework, as well as numerous abuses, which have been pointed out in the Monitoring results, that remained unpunished, suggest that the present legislation, having in mind that it does not motivate at all the political parties to comply by the Law and be liable for funds which are at their disposal, lose their meaning and only exist in order to satisfy the form. Unless we do not adopt international standards to strengthen the supervision of financing of political parties, and do not use opportunity to improve the legal framework, the political parties will have full legitimacy in the evasion of the Law, which would in that case be redundant.