Is the government aware of the problems with the advertising of state bodies?

From the response of Prime Minister Ana Brnabic to the Group for Media Freedom related to the regulation of advertising of state authorities (Section 10  https://goo.gl/KHoxj2

does not see that the Government was aware of the problems we ordered.

Namely, the reply indicated that the Law on Public Procurements will be changed and harmonized with EU directives, as well as the EU directives does not exclude advertising from the application of the Law.

However, as pointed Transparency Serbia ( (https://goo.gl/zXyLp8) there is a problem with the regulations and with the practice.

National advertising, in fact, is not fully regulated – the Law on Public Information and Media, as well as other media laws in 2014 can not deal with these issues, and the Law on Advertising in 2016, like its predecessor from 2005, focused on commercial advertising. Law on Public Procurement is incomplete and inconsistent regulates advertising in the media.

In practice, however, observed numerous examples of advertising the public sector (government, local government, public enterprises, public institutions...) that represents a waste of citizen's money, as it is paid for the publication of information of public interests, which media will otherwise publish, because it is paid advertising that is unnecessary because there is no competition, or advertisement aimed at an audience that is not interested to receive the message.

This problem is not unknown to the Government because, in addition to TS other entities pointed on it, including the government's Council for Combating Corruption, national and international organizations. Moreover, some of the problems were recognized in the previous Media Strategy, but nothing has been done to solve.

Amendments to the Law on Public Procurement is only one of the possible mechanisms for solving this problem, as we have pointed in analysis (https://goo.gl/YtvcbT) We have called, in fact that when working on amendments to the Law on Public Procurement of the Act exclude unjustified exceptions, and to open space for special by-law regulate all the peculiarities of state advertising (e.g. Elements of criteria for evaluation of bids, the method of determining needs, selection of advertising media that will not be considered as  discrimination)