Corruption proofing – stage 4

The Project “Corruption Proofing of Draft Legislative Acts – Phase IV” is envisaged to last throughout the period of July 2009 – December 2009 (hereinafter referred to as „Project” Proofing – stage 3”) is a follow-up to the „Corruption Proofing of the Draft Legislative Acts and Dissemination of Best Practices”, implemented in the period April 2008 – December 2008.

Project Overall Objective: Prevent corruption to spread in Moldova through passing of defective laws, increase transparency and accountability of the legislator towards voters, empower the legal community and civil society to exercise public control over the legislative process, and enhance the access of the people to diverse and balanced information about the stakes of the emerging legislation.

The Project financed by Civil Rights Defenders and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.

Project Objective:

• reveal the capacity of legal provisions to generate or favour acts of corruption and recommendations for removing these risks from the draft laws or for reducing their impact – taken into account by the legislator;
• set up public oversight of the legislative activism of the parliamentary members;
• raise the capacity of the legal community and civil society to engage more professionally in debates with the public authorities promoting draft laws;
• ensure dissemination of balanced information about corruption and discrimination risks of the upcoming legislation.

Project objectives will be achieved by conducting the following activities:

I. Corruption proofing expert opinions – CAPC will continue corruption proofing of draft legislative acts registered in the Parliament and of draft regulatory acts on express request of certain authorities, with subsequent submission of survey reports to Parliament and the requesting authorities.

II. Designing an on-line database for the monitoring of the legislative activism of each member of the Parliament – Substantiated data included in articles and other references regarding the activity of politicians / political parties represented in Parliament, through journalists’ and other stakeholders’ using the information from the CAPC database on legislative activism of deputies

III. Corruption proofing forum – Interested members of the legal community and civil society informed about the risks of the upcoming legislation, engaged in public discussions about them on the Corruption Proofing Forum and better prepared to approach the subject in further discussions with public authorities in charge.

IV. Information of the public about emerging laws – Public empowered to face the new legislative changes and/or having enough time to protest against the promotion of laws unfavourable to its interests, as well as public aware of the quality of the laws promoted by elected political parties.

Considering the vivid interest of the journalists in the particular activity of each member of parliament (especially in the electoral campaign period, when the journalists had to portray the profile of all the former deputies running in the new elections), it was found useful to develop a data-base available on-line to the journalists and public, in which information about the legislative activity of all deputies will be introduced in a systematic basis. Thus, the database will make possible to identify the deputies:

• actively promoting draft laws affected by severe risks of corruption, abuse and discrimination
• promoting private interests through draft laws
• supporting draft laws free from risks of corruption/abuse/discrimination or private interest promotion
• who are completely passive in terms of initiation of draft laws.

In general, the emphasis of this project is to be working more with the journalists and increase public awareness of the legislative process, as it is directly linked to political processes occurring in the country, as opposed to the previous approach of working almost exclusively with the lawyers. The database is a new component, which we believe will catch the attention of the journalists, as it will become a valuable source of information for their articles.

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During the project “Corruption Proofing of Draft Legislative Acts – Phase IV” CAPC launches a new product to coverage and to disseminate the information on activities of corruption proofing.

This component involves the development and distribution of a periodic Digest (newsletter) in electronic form containing information on:

• Recent proofing reports of CAPC to draft legislative acts and other acts;
• Description of projects surveyed;
• Basic objections and recommendations of the  CAPC experts;
• References to the corresponding discussions from CAPC  forum on the activity expertise;

Digest will be sent to the following categories of beneficiaries:

• Members of Parliament, advise standing committees and employees of the Parliament;
• Employees of ministries and other administrative authorities,involved in the process of designing and promoting of draft legislative acts and other normative acts;
• Media representatives;
• Members of civil society organizations;
• Representatives of the general public interested in legslativ process in Moldova.

Access to information published in the Digest legislative debates anticorruption will be done by subscribing to applicants.

Newsletters (Digest) will be prepared and distributed  depending on the number of draft legislative acts and variety of areas involved in these projects. People that  will ask Digest subscription will have the option to select areas that are of interest to their work.

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An on-line forum on corruption proofing (hereinafter referred to as Forum) was launched in order to disseminate best practices and to improve corruption proofing, to ensure better visibility and broader publicity of the CAPC corruption proofing activity.

The Forum includes three topics for discussion, and namely:

• CAPC corruption proofing methodology
• CAPC expert review reports
• The study on the effectiveness of corruption proofing mechanism developed by CAPC for the period 1 October 2006 – 1 October 2007.