 Okay, so hello everybody, my name is Dresden Kaufman, speaking on behalf of Gong and NGO from Zagreb, Croatia about something that's very close to our core activities, which oftentimes pertain to elections and other other processes of citizen participation. And in particular, a lot of telly was very helpful to us in exposing the misuse of public resources in an election campaign taking place in Croatia just this year in fact just a couple of months ago. Trying to set the stage, the context was that local elections took place in Croatia in spring that is in May of 2021. And these local elections are quite a complicated affair in Croatia is even such a small state a small country is very much fragmented in terms of territorial administration in as many as 556 local administrations. Those being cities or municipalities, and those grouped into 20 counties. And when you take into account the fact that this election is a parallel action of both executive and representative bodies. Mayor's and county prefects are elected. While it on other ballots represent representatives to county assemblies or city councils are also elected plus municipal councils are elected were applicable. You can see that this election is, in fact, several thousand micro elections taking place at the same time. Our tip off was calling from a citizen who noticed that a YouTube channel named the GF TV, which is somewhat difficult to translate but that you would be sort of around trying to go go around the place as in a walk about was very intensely active during two weeks in April which is very indicative because this is the time when the official or rather before the official election campaign was taking place. And this channel was very proactive in offering quite really quaint footage of seaside towns and villages across several counties in Croatia. Most are very successful local projects and in something akin to build invitations to citizens for these successful trends to continue. And in each of these videos available on the YouTube channel and comment mayors were very prominently featured. So one example of one of those lovely videos featuring this journalist, he on the left hand side of the photo here named the audience I believe who appeared in a number of cities, every time very standing very near to the incumbent mayor since presenting what advances were made in the quality of life in these cities in the past in the past term of the local government. And as we would soon find out, these videos were followed or made possible by a slew of service contracts with the digital media group which is a company operated by by the aforementioned journalist. And in fact, these contracts were very formulae each of them provided for the company to ensure 30 minutes of footage, including a talk with the mayor which would be broadcast at least twice on local television. So we promoted for 30 days on social media targeting an 18 to 65 year old audience following during and fall and after the the election campaign note that the 18 plus audience are also voters. The price was also fairly formulae 2600 euro for this package of services. So, being the curious bunch that we are we used our own national have a tele based platform called the mama but I was not to we have the right to know that work to send out generic query to as many as 68 cities and municipalities that we found listed on this YouTube channel so really our work was cut out for us by by the by this business enterprise. And we asked each of those to provide us with a contract, the exact contract which covers the filming and broadcasting services provided by by the company that was engaged. It's important to ask because according to our national act and financing of political activities and election campaigns, it is forbidden to found to fund political parties and campaigns from state bodies public companies legal persons with public and local self governments public companies owned by local self governments. So, essentially what we suspected was that public resources were being misused through these videos to effectively provide campaigns to incumbent mayors, and to the exclusion of their political opponents, given the unfair electoral advantage because they could directly sign the contracts with this company to have a video broadcast of their successes and advertise advertise their candidacy effectively for the next four year term. The outcome of the 68 queries was according to this breakdown below. We actually had a very successful turnout with the 54 complete responses from the citizen municipalities which proved that they in fact had had contracts with this company, several or partially successful or never came back one of them refused was a refusal because allegedly the city had no active contract with the company, but it might be the case that the cooperation was arranged in some other way. The aftermath was fairly scarce. Unfortunately, some media attention was brought here to the case by weekly newspaper and very highly read creation language news portal, but there were no legal sanctions whatsoever. In fact, the state electoral electoral commission gave us a direct answer that they cannot determine the activities of potential that is not yet confirmed candidates so in the first phase of the electoral campaign. They weren't sure if the incumbent mayors would in fact be candidates you could call this a cynical response but technically it's true. This was followed by the interpretation again of the state electoral commission that they could not determine that public resources were being misused for for campaign purposes because according to their interpretation. It's entirely possible that these videos were produced by in the goal of regularly promoting the activities of local so governments the very fact that it took place during the election campaign period was not sufficient proof in and of itself so in our lesson or take away from this case was that while our technological capabilities for ensuring fyi might be formidable there are no match for a lack of political will, which is very prevalent and plays us on a daily basis so thank you again for listening to my talk thank you blue sky timer for being such a convenient oppressor my peripheral view all the time and looking forward to hearing the other talks thank you again. Thank you so much and that was that was really interesting and not too cynical at all I think it's it's really important to be able to use fyi for this even if we can't immediately get a win out of it I'm sure I'm sure it's all good evidence for the future.