Inadequate proposal for media services procurement

The proposed amendments to the Law on Public Information and Media will not prevent abuses in the procurement of media services and advertising by the public sector. The provisions on the procurement of media services should be reformulated and clearly written, Transparency Serbia assessed, on the occasion of the debate on the package of urgent amendments to the Law in the Serbian Parliament.

The TS pointed out that the Government, without a previously held public debate, proposed amendments to the Law on Public Information and Media, and that the Assembly plans to adopt these changes in an urgent procedure, which is being justified by fulfilling obligations in the process of European integration.

As part of the amendments to the Law, the Government is proposing for the first time a solution for public sector advertising and the procurement of other media services. This area has not been sufficiently regulated in several regulations where it could have been done – the Law on Public Information, the Law on Public Procurement, the Law on Advertising – which Transparency Serbia has been warning about and making proposals since 2014. This results in the waste and misuse of public resources to buy influence in the media and promote public officials. In the last two years, the procurement of media services has also been used to a greater extent for public funds to reach media that violate professional standards and therefore do not meet the condition to receive money from the budget for co-financing projects.

The provision proposed by the Government only apparently solves this problem by requiring that the procurement of media services be carried out "in a transparent, objective, proportionate and nondiscriminatory manner", creating new problems in the process. Since there is no connection with the Law on Public Procurement, nor is the adoption of bylaws envisaged, it is unclear which procedure would apply to these procurements at all. The norm would be binding only on the authorities in the most narrow sense of this definition, and not on state-owned enterprises. Also, it could be interpreted in such a way that it still does not apply to procurements for which a tender has not been mandatory so far (e.g. procurements below one million dinars, purchase of television broadcasting time).

Transparency Serbia has therefore submitted to all parliamentary groups, the Speaker of the Parliament and the Committee on Culture and Information a proposal for amendments that would solve some of these problems. The proposal of the TS, among other things, envisages specifying the type of procedure that would be applied to the procurement of media services, obliging state-owned and controlled companies to apply the rules on the procurement of media services, the obligation to provide guarantees in terms of compliance with professional and ethical standards as a criterion for the procurement of services, the obligation to provide measurable indicators of achieving the advertising goal when procuring media services, as well as a ban on the procurement of media services that represent covert political promotion and promotion of public officials.