Civil society requests the removal of the chapter on NGOs and mass media from the draft of the National Integrity and Anticorruption Strategy

In November 2016, the National Anticorruption Center released a draft of the National Integrity and Anticorruption Strategy for the years 2017-2020 (a continuation of the Strategy) for public debate. In its initial version the draft of the strategy focused on 7 pillars:

• Parliament
• The government, the public sector, and local public administrations
• Justice and anticorruption agencies
• The Central Electoral Commission and political parties
• The Court of Accounts
• The People’s Advocate (Ombudsman)
• The private sector

In February 2017, the draft underwent conceptual changes, that is, the introduction of a new pillar (nr. VIII) dedicated to the activities of civil society and the mass media.

According to the authors of the draft, the inclusion of this chapter in the Strategy is needed to support the responsibility and independence of non-governmental organizations and mass media institutions, which at present are confronted with several problems including: a lack of confidence and integrity; financial dependence affecting priorities; and the involvement of political partisans—problems that negatively affect the efforts of civil society to fight against corruption. The authors maintain that the goal of the proposed actions and the expected results of pillar nr. VIII are to provide standards of ethics and integrity that can be implemented by non-governmental organizations, the mass media, and the donor community.

Civil society appreciates the efforts of the working group responsible for developing the Strategy, as well as the opportunity to present comments on the Strategy, but it has a critical position on the inclusion of Pillar VIII on the activity of civil society and the mass media as one of the priorities of the strategy on integrity and corruption.

Civil society organizations consider the inclusion of Pillar VIII in the Strategy to be a hasty and insufficiently justified action and request the exclusion of Pillar VIII from the strategy on the basis of the following arguments:

• The premises for including Pillar nr. VIII were not based on a multifaceted analysis;
• The authors’ approach—only including some of the organizations in the non-governmental sector and the mass media—creates a powerful presumption that the authors were aiming at a goal other than combating corruption and ensuring integrity in the non-governmental sector;
• The expected results and indicators provided by the authors of the Pillar do not offer true solutions for combating corruption and ensuring integrity in the non-governmental sector.

To this end, civil society organizations developed a series of proposals, modifications, and additions for the Strategy that they sent to the authors of the draft.

Signatory organizations:

1. The Association for Participative Democracy (ADEPT);
2. The Legal Resource Center of Moldova (CRJM);
3. Promo-LEX.

DOC – Proposals for changing and adding to the Draft of the National Integrity and Anticorruption Strategy (SNIA) for the years 2017-2020, sent for public consultation to the National Anticorruption Center (CNA)