FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION

Monitoring of Financing of Political Parties

The main goal of the project is achieving public insight into the sphere of the financing of political parties in Serbia and increasing transparency in this field so far inaccessible to the public. By enforcing the Law on Financing of Political Parties, on 1 st January, 2004 , a possibility was created to decrease the level of corruption in the sphere of politics and public administration through civic supervision of political parties. Increasing the citizens' awareness of the importance of public insight into the field of financing of political parties also represents one of the important goals of the project. The project focuses on the monitoring of the financing of the electoral campaigns for the election of representatives in Belgrade City Assembly and Mayor of the City of Belgrade on 19 th September/ 3 rd October, 2004 and has been realizing since July, 2004. The project was supported by Fund for an Open Society in Belgrade .

The project activities have as their aim collecting, processing, checking and analyzing data on financing the pre-elections campaigns at the local elections in Belgrade in 2004, as well as initiating public debates on financing political parties and improving the control of this process.

Within the project activities, the members of CeSID's team, who have been involved in monitoring of financing of political parties, visited the organizations Fair-Play Alliance in Bratislava , Slovakia and Delna in Riga , Latvia . These organizations have been handling this type of activities in their countries for many years and they have been achieving remarkable results. The aim of these working visits was to improve the methodology for monitoring the financing of political parties.

Monitoring the financing of political parties was conducted through monitoring the pre-elections propaganda of political parties on TV stations, in daily and weekly newspapers and on billboards. The work on collecting the information on the contents broadcasted on eight TV stations, which broadcast their program on the territory of Belgrade , was done by the agency AGB Strategic Research Serbia .

After the data was collected the cost price of the pre-elections campaigns of political parties at the local elections in Belgrade , 2004, was estimated. The estimate was done by CeSID's expert team in cooperation with representatives of marketing departments of the media, marketing agencies and agencies dealing with selling marketing space.

The first round table on the findings of the Report was held at the Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade on 14 th June, 2005 . You could send comments and suggestions on the Report to the e-mail cesid@cesid.org.yu