 Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats at the tables. So ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the regional conference. This year we are going to focus on financing the campaigns. It's their election campaigns. It's a very sensitive subject. It's a very important debate starting from the dilemma of freedom of speech and need to have full clarity about the expenses for the political parties in the election process. So transparency of expenses. Moreover, it is obvious that the quantity of the financial means influences the quality of the information. And more processes depend on this, including the election process. The discussions about this always raised a lot of interest from different parties. And during the time, the role of the money in this process was underestimated. But it is obvious that today it is crucial to talk about this and to talk about how this can impact the activities in the field. And today we have to talk about the need of financing and the modality to how to monitor the process. We welcome today the presence of this event of its excellence, the president of the Republic of Moldova, Madame Maya Sandu, and we offer her the word. Good morning. Thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you very much for the idea to organize this event in the Republic of Moldova. Thank you, the guests, for being here. And I would like to discuss a little bit about the democracy in the Republic of Moldova and its history, how things evolved. We remember that at the beginning of the 90s, we had a lot of enthusiasm. At least in our country, we wanted to learn what is democracy. We wanted to build trustworthy institutions to learn about democratic processes and consolidate those processes was our target. But at that time, we had very fragile institutions, much more fragile than they are today. At that time, the process of primitive accumulation of capital, so-called primitive accumulation of capital started. Some of the people managed to gather more money and they understood that they can influence the democratic processes through their money and they understood that they can do this without too much of a legal supervision and with less involvement of the institutions because those institutions were still learning what democracy is and how they can ensure the same conditions for everyone and democracy. And after many years, we actually came to the situation where enormous amounts of money are spent within election campaigns. We are a small country, not a very rich country, and some of the parties were spending money in our country in their election campaigns more than the money spent by the parties, for example, in Germany. And then we identified that these money were dirty money. So this means that it had a negative impact. And a very profitable investment was the investment in politics, spending as much money as possible through political parties and the political parties would reach power with those money. And then they would recover, let me use a beautiful word, recover the money afterwards through all kinds of schemes, all kinds of illegal procurement. And we know that this happened in the Republic of Moldova. Unfortunately, this undermined the democratic processes in our country and many citizens in our country made the conclusion that only the corrupt people can reach the leading positions in politics in our country. And the origin of some money, of some people, was a dilemma. And those people were deciding the fate of our country. And in 2015, me and my colleagues, we came to the power and we identified these challenges and we tried to find a way to create a transparent process with the correct legislation in the Republic of Moldova. And we wanted to prove to our people that despite all the problems that happened previously we nevertheless can have honest politicians in this country. Through a coincidence, 7 of July 2017, 16, 7 years ago, I was posting on my page a question, a rhetorical question, is it possible to finance in a transparent way a political party? And we were in an election and we had so many questions to the state institutions because even the legal provisions were confusing. Even though they were established for some time, many political parties, they had no questions for those legal provisions probably because they were not so keen on respecting them. Institutions were not answering to our questions that were crucial for us and of course the parties that were leading the country at that time were not interested at all to bring any clarity in the process because the parties were financed with bags of money that were brought from, we didn't know where at that time. Afterwards, we found out, but it took us some time. We insisted, we wanted to clarify, we wanted answers, we wanted to do things in a correct way. Another example from my personal experience, me as the member of a party, a founder member, I was not able to make any donation to the party because at that time I didn't have any income in the Republic of Moldova. I was leaving from my savings that I made outside the country and I had all the proving documents of showing the origin of that money. But nevertheless, the legislation of the Republic of Moldova at that time was telling me that it is not okay. This would mean external financing and it was about a few hundred lei. And of course here I need to mention also the people from the diaspora. I was present physically, I was resident of the Republic of Moldova and I was not able to support my party and those people that were working outside the country but they were close always with their hearts to the Republic of Moldova and they were very interested in the destiny of the country and they wanted to come back to a better country and they wanted to involve with financial support for the party that was promoting the change. And with the team with whom I started, we went through a deep process of education of the citizens about what it means to correctly finance a political party because before that the discussions were very, not very deep about this. People were not so keen to find out all the details about the origin of the money. So many people were thinking that you don't need so much money for this process but there were mistakes. And I remember cases when I was discussing with many of the people that were encouraging us at the beginnings to create a political party because they were so disappointed by the previous political parties in our country and we were telling them, okay, but we still need your support. Not only your votes, we need your support in terms of financial support also but we were blamed for trying to get money for our activities. So people did not understand at that time what is a donation for a campaign for the activity of a party. And the percentage of people who wanted to help and who understood it was a very low percentage, 4% but during the next years we managed to explain, we managed to communicate. And another example from that same campaign from 2016 shows that it is possible to educate it is possible to help people understand why it is so important to have transparency in this process. For example, when I reached the second tour in our election process our party had on our official account 4,000 lei. This was the second round and these were the only resources that we managed to gather. The resources actually that left from the first phase of the election process. And probably you won't believe it but the next day when we informed people about that we actually had a queue at our door of people that wanted to donate money to our party. What I'm trying to say by this is that we need two important things in order to make correct and fair politics and further these politics to be translated into a fair governance. First we need a good legal framework, not only a good one, a fair one and a very clear one. And all the institutions to understand how to apply those laws in practice. And the second thing is for the citizens to understand how their involvement, financial involvement can contribute and can change the situation because the idea is for the government to represent the citizens and not certain groups, certain interests that are interested to bring some dirty money into the process. So because we know that through those corruptive schemes people with special interests reach the power. And this weakens the trust in the institutions of the citizens. So the political corruption is still a problem and we speak today about the illegal financing of the political parties from outside. And I'm going to mention the Russian Federation here that invested, I don't know if this is the right word but I would use this word invested in the political parties that have the only purpose to serve the interests of another country not the country of the Republic of Moldova although the legislation prohibits this kind of financing. Nevertheless our institutions tolerated this. I remember a discussion with former general prosecutor at the highest council of security and we were talking about this, the national security subject. And when someone interferes with millions of dollars in order to influence the election policies even if we talk about less, smaller amounts of money, nevertheless this creates huge risks for the security of the country. And the answer that I received in that dialogue from the prosecutor was that these are political games. This is political competitiveness and it has nothing to do with the state security or fight against corruption. And if you discuss with different prosecutors, different judges, you will find people who are going to say that this is not a problem. Unfortunately in 30 years this problem was not properly recognized by the authorities. Many of the authorities were benefiting from these schemes and this subject was put under the carpet and it had to be discussed within the society. And many institutions were telling us this is the problem of the political parties. This is not our problem but those institutions they were created to make sure that the law is respected and those that go against the law they should be penalized. So the justice reform is for us in this context a key element because we want to ensure those conditions. Improvement of the legal framework is still a necessity although we already made a lot of efforts till we have to continue this process. Many people wanted to do politics, wanted to be in politics but starting from all the problems that we are facing today we can make the conclusion that even changing the legal framework is not enough because we see how some of the political parties that are actually very corrupt criminal groups they are using undeclared dirty money that come from obscure sources and their purpose is to influence the votes. And the Republic of Moldova in that sense is very vulnerable because we are a small country from one hand and from another hand it is very easy to buy in a small country an impressive number of votes. And the Republic of Moldova also has a lot of money with small income and this is an additional vulnerability because of course in this context there are people that are ready to sell their votes for a specific amount of money not understanding to what extent they damage the system because those who buy their votes they do not have the interest to serve those people they have their own purpose that needs to be served. I have discussed about this previously I believe we have to make the penalties more harsh and not only for those that are buying the votes but also those that are selling their votes because sometimes weak penalties they do not function sometimes people say okay that penalty is not gonna affect me so much I'm gonna gain much more if I'm gonna do this and in the case of those who are buying votes it is a very convenient situation so we need to change that behavior we need to improve the legal framework and from another side we need to change our attitude to be more responsible to have more responsibility from the institutions and discuss seriously about what tools we have available to do that and we have to stress upon the cooperation between the Central Election Commission but also it is very important to bring all the stakeholders at the table of discussion because sometimes some processes are initiated within the election campaign but those processes are finalized after four years this is not helping us protect our democratic processes yes of course there are trials and by the end of the day penalties are paid but those decisions are coming too late in time and those that bought the votes they can already reach very responsible positions and they can bring a lot of damage to the democratic processes initiated in our country I see a lot of people in this room that are representing public institutions and everything that I'm saying today is not news for you some of you you don't have an answer to our questions and today we have a governance that understands how important the authentic democracy is we have political support we have external support we can build strong institutions right now but we have to start changing things while it's not too late I will repeat myself we are a small country with small money of course Russian Federation also is continuing to undermine the democratic processes in the Republic of Moldova and a lot of damage can be done with that to damage to our democratic processes so we still need to learn from the good practices international good practices mainly when we speak about online advertisement and how we can prevent the lack of transparency in financing of those online advertisements and we are confronted with this problem today when we have different political parties that are trying to destabilize this political situation in the Republic of Moldova in tandem with the Kremlin and we have a few election campaigns this year and we want to make sure that everyone is going to have equal chances and the law is going to be respected by everyone the informational technologies the social media represents an opportunity I personally benefited when together with my colleagues we have created the political party and we started to promote ourselves without financial resources on the social media and we managed to send our messages to reach our people but in the same time the same tools the same social media can create a lot of risks for the democratic processes and it is important in this context to have the agreement of those networks mainly when we have election campaigns to have immediate reactions to have the creation of teams that would immediately react on the request of the state institutions because if we receive an answer after four months it's too late the campaign is actually compromised already the Republic of Moldova is a positive example because we managed to bring down a corrupt system a corrupt regime that actually came to the power by using dirty money neglecting the law on financing the political parties but in the same time the Republic of Moldova still faces a lot of challenges in this field and I hope that today within this discussion and not only today we will manage to identify good solutions that are appropriate for us and for other countries that are confronted with the same problem we believe in democracy we thought in these 30 years to build this democracy we are aware that we are a fragile democracy we have internal risks we have external challenges but the Republic of Moldova wants it freedom and we hope to keep receiving all the support from our international partners but we need a consolidated civil society also thank you very much Thank you Mrs. President you started about the initiative of this possibility to ensure oversight including over the finance of the political parties and to take into account the observation missions for the elections and also consolidate the central authorities starting last year we created a specialized unit but look we are facing new and new challenges that may look that in an area we brought things to normal but there's always room to come up with new improvements first of all and secondly to react to the challenges including to those in the online because it's actually here where there are techs and we talk about security and in the hidden campaigns of misinformation and as you said a lot depends the government depends the governance depends on these processes and you talk about the use of social media or other digital tools so some time ago these would seem just innovations something this are now they are already something or a must and something indispensable it has been proven that the online environment is a vast area for the electoral competitors to do campaigning sometimes without declaring the fund finance and also it is sometimes difficult to follow how such campaigning is financed sometimes it's even impossible to make a link between the finance and the communication between those who want to achieve results in the elections how can we practically prove where this invisible line between the interest of the citizen to know to have access to information as well as the interest of a political actor particularly when we talk about politically controlled media and the speed that the digital tools are being developed and the possibilities in using them represent a challenge in the one hand because once but also an opportunity an extraordinary opportunity because they allow using new strategies allow gathering new supporters because these tools are very popular among youth so mass media, TV, the press we can say that they are in a way overcome or obsolete in electoral campaigns political parties or electoral competitors they focus or redirect their actions in the online media so and it's neither restricted or monitored compared to the campaigning strictly regulated in the electoral legislation on the law on political parties there is a huge difference between what we consume in the online environment and what we can really check with the support of the audio visual council members a study of the council view republished in 2018 on the internet and electoral campaigns found out that one of the gaps in the regulations is the incapacity to provide equal conditions to all those involved in the campaigning and we cannot speak about a failure competition another gap of the fact that we cannot regulate or we cannot follow or keep under control this space is connected to finance or expense reporting for the online campaigning or advertising publicity because these can be hidden or camouflaged because sometimes with well we are the starting point and even with the scarce resources we try to follow the campaigns of some political parties and compare with the finance reported in the financial statements and there are differences between what they report and what they use the factor or spare the factor because the campaigns are done are insured through said parties camouflaged through advertising companies or consultancy firms for this reason it's very difficult to follow and estimate the real expenses of a party over electoral competitor and of course we should not limit only to findings in this regard and things should not remain unregulated otherwise we will continue to encounter difficulties so without trying to interfere with the freedom of press and also to the fundamental human rights we need to come up with regulations in this area but before proceeding to practice we would need to first carry out a thorough analysis of this space regarding campaigning in the online and study the experience of developed democracies and see what we can take over and implement in the Republic of Moldova of course taking into account the specifics of our national specifics or characteristics so we need to take into account one more thing we really aspire to integrate into the European Union we are making efforts in this regard and we are well aware of the fact that this route would mean bringing everything related to political finance and electoral compliance to order so we are aware that digital technologies are not always used with a good intention and in this grey triangle, finance triangles with trolls and these bring or cause irreparable damage to the democratic processes so we are far from the thought that an electoral campaign or political activity can be done without money with little money we are well aware we realize that donations are needed and incomes or revenues are important for the political party to keep being active but we want this parties to be self-sufficient in financial terms but the finance should be clean, the money should be clean we don't want the political parties including through sponsorships as the Madam President said like sponsorships from outside the country to jeopardize or to the election results and hence the integrity and correctness of the governance so the authorities have the task to ensure a specialized monitoring of the electoral process of finance including the digital activities and the way they use it but I want to reiterate we need to have knowledge and skills and also there is a need for new responsibilities that we are not yet ready to embrace and we need to learn from the experience of others and share our experience because as you said Madam President we will gain some experience in this regard and in this context we need the support from experts from the civil society organizations all the politicians and political parties because a democratic process should build upon a healthy competition and not be compromised by digital elements or financial, obscure finance elements I'd like to reiterate that over the past years the Republic of Moldova has made significant progress in ensuring transparency of the political parties finance but we've done it in a traditional manner we could regulate the expenses, how to report the reporting terms, limits and the donations or ceilings for the donation but the reality tells us that we need to embrace more the online environment as I was saying is a very broad one in terms of the possibility particularly if you want to ensure correctness in terms of finance and if you don't make efforts in this sense all the other accomplishments made so far won't have the expected results and my conclusions I'd like to say that we have a lot of expectations from this conference based on a dialogue or exchange of experience to lay the foundation of a common vision on the way in which the new digital technologies and the finance for online activities to be exclusively to the benefit of the democratic process Thank you very much for the role I'd like to invite His Excellency Mr Kent Longston, United States Ambassador to the Republic of Moldova Thank you, good morning Chairperson Karaman, colleagues, all of you experts it's always difficult to follow the president as she talks about personal experience and of course we have Chairperson Karaman who's doing this every day but I'm here because the United States believes very strongly in what you all are doing here and the importance of working on this very subject I'm very pleased Moldova is hosting this regional conference and bringing together colleagues from a number of neighboring countries including a strong showing from Ukraine a number of flags on the tables which is great to examine this important topic money and policy President Biden said last year in Warsaw we are now experiencing a great battle for freedom a battle between democracy and autocracy between liberty and repression between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force we've seen across this whole region those on the other side of this battle will use all of the hybrid tools at their disposal including using money to try and undermine the democratic institutions they perceive is threatening their interests of course just next door we have seen that the Russian government will stop at nothing to undermine Ukraine's European and democratic trajectory through its brutal full-scale invasion we've seen it right here in the Republic of Moldova where Kremlin-backed fugitive oligarchs used illegal financing to try and create political unrest, influence election and legislation and undermine Moldova's bid for EU candidate status they've used money to subvert the country's democracy law enforcement apparatus, judicial system and media sector and it's important they not succeed however these channel challenges are not stopping the Republic of Moldova from taking firm step toward European integration strengthening democratic institutions and cleaning up corruption thanks to the commitment of a reform minded government and the citizens that elected it the US government supports Moldova's path toward a European future as part of our partnership with Moldova to build a democratic prosperous and secure future but today is not just about Moldova it's important for every democracy to be constantly vigilant we need to strengthen our democratic institutions against all these threats and we need to take steps to address the constantly evolving role of money and politics just as the chairperson mentioned increased internet usage has allowed political parties and candidates to reach larger audiences through targeted campaigns and political parties are receiving and spending more online but that's what we also have to be careful I applaud the Central Election Commission here for improving its information technology infrastructure and exercising its political party finance oversight mandate particularly in light of the latest electoral reforms we've been proud to support these efforts through USAID's funding of UNDP's electoral reform program and since 2017 this has been funded at a rate of about 3.7 million dollars by the end of this year the increase in disinformation and foreign interference in elections means effective oversight of online political financing is all the more important to ensuring fair, transparent and democratic elections and again we know this very well in our own country in the United States we're committed to working with our partners throughout the region and around the world to protect our democratic institutions this obviously includes our partners like the Netherlands and India International as well as global initiatives like the Summit for Democracy and our work through the Department of State and USAID with partners in many of your countries including the Central Election Commission the UNDP, the International Foundation for Election Systems the International Republican Institute the National Democratic Institute and of course local civil society organizations to help all of you conduct free and fair elections I very much hope your discussions here today lead to a renewed cooperation and a very clear vision of a way ahead thank you very much thank you very much your excellence for this appreciation and for your long-standing support I know the Embassy of the Netherlands also support keeps supporting the efforts of the Central Electoral Commission in improving the electoral processes in our country today we have Mr. Flores van Eyck the charged affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the Republic of Moldova and I'd like to give him the floor you have the floor I'm going to find the Charger d'affaires right now of the Embassy of the Netherlands it was upgraded two months ago the status has changed to a privileged embassy we have an ambassador who is not here with us today but it is my pleasure to speak a few words on behalf of the government of the Netherlands which currently holds the position of chair of the Council of Member States of IDEA International together with CEC, the Central Electoral Commission co-organizers of this important conference I think it is very fitting that this regional conference is organized right here in beautiful Castel Mimí in the heart of Moldova a country that is quite vulnerable to online threats interference in elections by criminal actors and other hybrid strategies that aim to undermine democracy and the rule of law a situation that is not new but that has certainly become more worrying because of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine as we look around us in Moldova in my country almost anywhere in the world we notice that the internet has reached even the smallest image even the most remote island is online today and social media are everywhere even grandparents we used to discuss the news on the benches of the village square are now subscribed to Telegram channels or check the latest news on Facebook there are very few citizens of the world whose hearts and minds are not at least partly shaped by information technology this of course opens up opportunities for political parties and candidates that form the backbone of any healthy democracy these political parties and candidates can now reach out to their constituencies more easily than ever before they can reach an incredible amount of voters online with targeted messages at very limited costs and it is no surprise that political parties and candidates have embraced the internet and are spending more money online than ever and that includes dirty money as well politicians interact with voters and constituency online that is a natural thing and it is potentially a good thing and I think that the president has seen the importance of that for her campaign as well digital technologies can encourage more people to participate in the marketplace of ideas to go out and vote to decide by whom they should be governed and this of course strengthens democracy but we have to be very careful because when politicians go online we see two worlds colliding two worlds that have proven to be notoriously difficult to regulate the world of campaign financing and the world we know as cyberspace what we see is that modern technologies facilitate inauthentic online behavior in an increasingly convincing way bots, troll armies, artificial intelligence and other technologies deceive voters they generate and spread fake news in spaces of conflict they incite hatred or they block the access of honest candidates to the public they have the potential to destroy the fundamental democracy and we need to prevent that we need to guarantee the rights of citizens to make an informed choice and exercise their vote freely and ensure a level playing fields for political competition also online especially online therefore we need to have appropriate campaign finance regulation tailored for the online domain and at least as important the rights, mandates and skills for state authorities to ensure compliance such regulation is unfortunately almost completely lacking also in my country, the Netherlands which is currently trying to build this legislation but it's not easy I hope this conference that brings together policy makers social media platforms, political parties candidates and campaigners will be used to share examples with practices learn from each other to agree on the principles that should be at the core of any regulatory framework for online campaign finance a framework that brings transparency that encourages honesty and advance fraudulent practices while guaranteeing freedom online and protecting the freedom of speech and last but not least a framework that is workable and that can be enforced a framework that truly protects the integrity of the political process and electoral campaigns thank you very much and good luck thank you very much thank you very much for the support today's event is organized as you know at the initiative and in partnership with the International Institute for Democracy and the election assistance in the election process and I would like to offer the word to Mr. Samba understand the director European floor is yours thank you good morning everyone other world presidents do excellencies their partners and participants I will speak on behalf of all organizing partners to CEC Moldova of course IFAS NDI OSCE ODEAR and International Idea on behalf of all of us to this workshop after four years of absence because we first started these discussions on money and politics in Eastern Europe back in Tbilisi in 2017 we had a pause of four years but now with the same partners some others as well we are back and discussing this in Moldova and in the meantime a lot has happened a pandemic has come made us all more digital than before of course a terrible war of aggression in Ukraine has started but more positively also EU accession has started discussions for Moldova Ukraine Georgia and has led to a rapid development of democracy discussions I want to thank the Moldovan CEC for hosting us here at this important juncture for Moldova to introduce reforms historic moment for its EU accession for which political finance is a key prerequisite and just two weeks ago we saw that Moldova was lauded by the EU in its oral report of the accession discussions where it referred to the progress on electoral reform so we see that actual steps are being taken now we are here to discuss exactly that the two challenges of digitalization on the one hand and many refer to the challenges already and the regulation of money and politics so that's a devilish combination that can bring about opportunities but also threats the changes that we've seen is in fundraising online advertising online but also reporting and disclosure online we are able to reach more people at lower cost than ever before because of digital media so we should celebrate all these important steps that digitalization has brought to the funding of political parties but we should also realize that too often the negatives outshine the positives political finance is often obscured by the opaqueness of disinformation of personal data breaches but also of the illegal funding streams that we see all across the world from criminal groups but also foreign state actors and all of that is much harder than the traditional forms of political finance and we see that regulatory bodies and a few of you refer to it already lack the technical knowledge to venture in this completely new field of work so we should therefore work to modernize political finance frameworks in ways that respond to these new challenges and this cannot simply be an add-on a little bit of extra for the online sphere we really need to completely rethink the field of political finance for the online sphere and that's what we're here to do today at my organization, International Idea we have done a little bit of this work by working already with the Moldovan CEC and the big online global platforms Facebook, Google and so on we work with the European Commission on their EU regulation in this area which is upcoming soon and we will soon be publishing a handbook on European practices in relation of online political advertisement but many of the partners in this room are doing similar very very valuable work and I think that collective effort can bring the discussion forward so we are only at the beginning of this discussion and we have to start together luckily the likes of Moldova but also Ukraine, Georgia many of those in the room here today are at the global vanguard in the area of digital developments that are happening but those developments are happening at lightning speed so no country even if they are very developed not in Europe, not in the US nor elsewhere in the world can do this alone the lightning speed at which digital developments are happening necessitate that we do this together because Moldova's online campaign developments of today can be those of the Netherlands tomorrow and this of the US tomorrow yesterday so discussions on online campaign funding have to be a two-way street we have to move away from the old one-sided teaching others but really development together we have to keep up with the speed of technological development but also of those of cyber criminals in foreign states who do not mind international borders and if they do not mind international borders we have to do this in solidarity between countries we have to do this in an international way so with our collective efforts of building the regulation of online campaigning that started in Georgia in 2017 we can do more here in Moldova today thank you once again, Madam President colleagues, partners, excellencies and as co-organizers we look forward to the proceedings thank you very much, Mr. Star indeed you are right, we have to move very fast the speed of light in regulating the online space mainly when it comes to financing the election campaigns and we can do this only together as you said in collaboration in the process of exchange of good practices and experiences between different countries thank you very much your excellency and now we announce a technical break of five minutes in order to switch to the... Dear colleagues are we ready to start Dear colleagues I am happy to announce our first session on online campaign finance which relates to the existing and emerging international standards best practices in the field of online campaign finance unfortunately we have to say that there are certain tendencies and developments in regulation of online campaign finance and we would during this session we would like to talk about standards or probably lack of standards in this particular field and let me introduce our keynote speaker Barbara Jones-Stone Street she is our international experts in political and campaign finance issues she is also a member of core group of experts of all these democratic institutions and human rights on political parties but she has started her devotion actually her work with political and campaign finance in the national French national commission on campaign accounts Barbara has worked a lot with audio and election observation activities but also with Carter Center with Venice Commission International Idea and European Parliament and she has also been engaged in several technical assistance projects with IFAS, UNDP and MDI and now she is ready to bring the main topic for today's discussions the floor is yours Barbara thank you very much Alexi good morning everyone excellencies, distinguished members of parliament oversight bodies, their colleagues, their friends I have the honour to have been asked to give the opening remarks of this very interesting conference and I thought that it would be a good idea actually to start setting the goals of today and tomorrow's conference so bottom line what do we expect from this conference we want to increase our understanding of online campaigning and the challenges posed by this issue we want to explore regulatory and non-regulatory options we want to see what is currently feasible in terms of monitoring online campaigning and we also want to develop a roadmap for further action to do so we will hear presentations from the main institutional and non-institutional stakeholders we will be given hopefully the possibility to ask questions and we will have lots of discussion to help us navigate the sony topic of online campaign finance or to put it differently the regulation the control of online campaigning speaking about online campaigning is stimulating it's challenging it's refreshing because it's new but it's also extremely complex as online campaigning is a cross-cutting issue that touches on different sets of legislations, political finance regulations, media rules, data protection laws and political integrity frameworks everyone has a more or less vague understanding of the concept everyone is aware that digital campaigning has become the most cost-efficient and effective campaigning tool but nobody really knows the magnitude of what's going on online on social media platforms and the cost associated with this production and dissemination of political advertisements when considering whether and how to regulate online campaigning consideration sorry must be given to reconcile two strengths of somehow conflicting democratic principles impacting on online campaign finance ones that address democratic participation expression, rights to political participation and another that focuses on anti-corruption measures and fosters political finance transparency and accountability both are important to the understanding of the scope and purpose of regulating online campaigning and I'm sure that the presentations that we follow will certainly help us understand how and why online campaign finance rules need must be balanced out with the need to respect these fundamental freedoms. First question, what do we mean by online campaign finance? Are we talking about online campaign finance or more generally political finance? Are we talking about the ads used by electoral contestants but also non-contestant campaigners to raise awareness of voters share information and engage with potential voters? Are we talking about all forms of online political advertisements organic and paid ones? The new EU regulation could play a very important role in setting standards across the EU single markets and notably by providing a uniform definition of online campaigning political advertising. This would ensure voters have the right information about the online content of viewing and assist those who are called upon to enforce the rules. However, this regulation has not been voted into law yet. Country regulations that will be presented during the second session will most certainly shed some light on actions taken to address the challenges raised as regards the attempt to define and regulate online campaigning. Second question is impacted by the digitalization of the campaigns. Within it, digital campaigning has become the most effective tool used by electoral and non-electro contestants to reach out to voters. For instance, the Brexit referendum took place almost entirely online. As such, campaigning is becoming more prominent, and the amount of money involved is significant. Legal frameworks, national legal frameworks are increasingly facing challenges to regulate this area, especially in the lack of international and regional instruments. The recent drift in the misuse of abuse of online campaigning is mostly enabled by weak or unenforced campaign finance rules. To be effective and it's something that Madam President recalled and addressed at the very beginning of her speech, a campaign finance system needs to combine two important features. A robust legal framework and enforcement and implementation mechanisms to hold electoral actors and political actors accountable. To ensure transparency, accountability and a level playing field, it is absolutely legitimate to try to regulate online campaigning and political advertising. The emergence of a new corpus of rules impacts all the institutional and non-institutional stakeholders. While online campaigning has become as opened up and democratized the way campaigns are being run, it has also introduced new players in the electoral arena. The absence of regulations has in many cases rendered the oversight of such campaigning almost impossible for oversight bodies which do not necessarily have the mandate to oversee online campaigning the resources, the capacity or the expertise to do so. While campaign finance monitoring has become one critical aspect of the observation world carried out by CSOs in the past decade, the emergence of online campaigning has challenged their observation methodology as the access to open finance data is not always easy either because it doesn't exist or because there is no available access. And finally the private sector is often blamed for corruption issues and to ensure a better corporate governance it is critical to engage with all electoral stakeholders. Social media platforms have become a key partner to regulate online campaigning and to ensure that their policies do not clash with domestic regulations. Last question what are the emerging emergence has we've seen unregulated online campaigning can harm the integrity of the democratic process as online campaigning can be a vehicle for foreign influence and a great tool for this information. Unregulated third party campaigning advertising constitutes one of these emerging threats especially where electoral actors are outspent by third parties I'm thinking about the US for instance through sometimes undisclosed sources of financing foreign interference where foreign states try to influence the outcome of an election or to discredit the democratic process. And I think a particular element touched on by President Sendoo is to consider as regards one country's vulnerability to foreign influence is the correlation that exists between the permeability of the political sphere and the level of citizens' dissatisfaction with their political class. Illicit micro-targeting we're now going to go back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal the use of automated body counts and trolls and the use of AI generated content as showcased in the recent Toronto mayoral election. So why some politicians see artificial intelligence as a way to help reduce campaign cost? This new technology also has the potential to spread this information to a wide audience. All these malpractices and threats are enabled by the lack of transparency in campaign finance and weak oversight systems. Regulating online campaigning requires a coordinated effort and the cooperation between all state holders is key to achieve greater transparency in online campaigning and ensure that non-compliance is sanctioned. We have a saying in France that can be roughly translated by democracy is not something that you can put a price on but it comes at a cost. So how to build the momentum to advance legal reform and better regulate online campaigning and hold electoral actors accountable? Our discussions today and tomorrow should help us conceptualize and formalize challenges encountered by electoral stakeholders. Solutions that have been adopted solutions that have been tried and solutions that have failed to regulate the impact of online campaigning on electoral processes and down the road on electoral integrity issue will also help increase our understanding of online campaigning. Thank you very much. Thank you Barbara. Dear colleagues we are a little bit behind of our scheduler therefore I would really kindly propose to merge our coffee break without formal break but please enjoy the coffee we would happy to continue with our next speaker we speak today about the online campaign finance and our speaker will be also online I don't see him yet so I'm happy to present Oskar Brzezinski Yes, here you are Oskar is representing his government and social input partner for Central and Eastern Europe in Meta he worked in European Parliament also in big private companies in Google and now represents Meta and we are happy to hear the position of one of the most popular social platforms which is used or at times misused in political campaign and campaign finance. Oskar Brzezinski Thank you so much. I hope you can hear me well if not then please please let me know I'm very excited to have a chance to participate in this conference albeit virtually which I sincerely apologize I'd love to be in person unfortunately some travel plans clashed so promise next time I will try to make in person but we have suspected there will be a lot of discussion about our platforms and for a good reason because we had met here we also very much think every day in a group of hundreds and thousands of people and how to bring more transparency to political and electoral arts ecosystem how to make sure that this ecosystem is safe and secure we all operate in a highly adversarial space and we learn from various mistakes and fiascos that have been also quoted here and I think that we are right now very much in a position to offer one of the most transparent political and actual arts ecosystem that online platforms can offer so today I'll be relatively short in my presentation but I would love to present you with some overview of how currently the political and electoral transparency ecosystem works at Meta hopefully this will be a pretty good starting point for your discussions about how it can evolve how it can be also regulated in various jurisdictions and how we can engage in a meaningful dialogue to make it even better and better so if you don't mind I'll just right now share my screen hope you can see it because I have a limited view but please let me know if not otherwise I'll just continue so my name is Oscar I'm leading the work of government social impact team which basically means that I oversee any correlations and points of exchange between our products and political and government entities and really for us and for my work directly increasing political transparency is very much top of mind every day so just without further ado really think about the Meta arts transparency ecosystem these days it is really a bundle and it's really a bundle that is designed to bring transparency to three types of categories of pieces of advertising the first one is political arts so all that relates to political figures politicians but also political topics and current politics in general the second piece is electoral arts basically pieces of advertising that discuss the upcoming elections in a given jurisdiction but also those that discuss electoral procedures methods of voting the rights to vote basically all the elections related processes and procedures and the third type of arts that we do enforce in some jurisdictions are related to social issues and there is a pretty robust catalogue of social issues that we operate all these types of arts they do require what we call an authorization an authorization is nothing else but a process that each and every advertiser needs to take in order to be eligible to basically publish these arts on our platforms this process has few steps and you can see the description of that process on a slide already it starts with confirming the identity so we need to confirm that we are dealing with a real person then it's followed by creating a disclaimer disclaimer these days they can have either a form of an institutional name a name of an institution a political party, media outlets government organization or just a regular user that is that is publishing these arts or it can have a form of a name of a page on facebook that is basically publishing these arts whatever it is we do require it to reflect the reality one of the notions of bringing transparency is really storing all these details for seven years in the publicly available library we do also extend not only the library itself but also the API to this library to make sure that we do empower researchers we do empower government organizations regulators central election commissions or electoral management bodies to effectively monitor the political and electoral arts transparency and of course the overall space I'm often asked why why don't we why don't we constantly evolve on changing and giving even more details on this process and actually we do so for instance last year we have introduced the information about the targeting options that are being used by the advertiser to target specific political or electoral arts we do these days publish these details at the page level at the pretty aggregated level but also we kind of extend the details at the specific art piece level to that of the researchers and regulators so as you can see it's a very much evolving ecosystem and if we really look into that it's not only the presence of the authorization it's not only the presence about the ad library but it's also the increased transparency of pages themselves I had a chance to be in Moldova about two months ago and meet with forest stakeholders and we've been discussing some pressing issues around political arts and various nuances that have been playing a role in the current politics and then we took a talk and we realized that actually transparency of pages and the fact that we do publish the history of the changes of the names of the page is a very powerful tool that can enable various monitoring organizations to really discover some adversarial efforts of various actors to these lead users and we've seen this transparency in action and also enabled us as a company to act relatively fast in enforcing our policies in that specific context but of course in many other similar contexts that our teams have been dealing in the region so we do publish not only the history of the name changes of the page but also the countries where the admins of those pages reside it's not related to only those two building blocks so authorization or pages transparency it's also very much the presence of the ad library and the fact that we do well block advertisers from targeting other jurisdictions other than they are based in so basically you need to be authorized in a country X to be and physically reside in country X to be able to publish political electoral or social issue ads this is the measure that is causing a lot of friction on the market we do receive a lot of criticism for that from our commercial advertisers because for various social issue topics it prevents them from running successful commercial campaigns but we keep that measure because it's one of the strongest measure against for interference and it's also the fact that if we do require advertisers to be based in a country where they are authorized while they are publishing ads we also enable monitoring institutions electoral management bodies and law enforcement to take any action that is needed in case the rules of electoral procedures for instance are broken by specific actors I'll not be going into the details of what's in the ad library but I just wanted to comment that it's a searchable database that we do present a number of details there we do it in both in the format of of a like searchable UX friendly outlet that you've probably had a chance to interact with but also in the format of the API that we extend for free to anyone who wants you just need to confirm your identity to use the API and through the API you can conduct bespoke studies longitudinal studies and any other types of analysis that is helpful for various watchdogs monitoring organizations electoral management bodies and journalists and basically anyone who is interested in that space to get more information about what's going on in the political ads actual ads, social issue ads ecosystems in a given country we also publish very many ad details these days beyond potential reach the amount of money spent locations reached, breakdown of demographics like I mentioned it's also targeting information and beyond that we also very much take care of the fact that you sometimes need to have a one stop shop overview of what's going on and that is why there is an improved version of the ad library report you can these days also download this in the excel format in case there is a need to just take a very quick snapshot of what's going on in a given jurisdiction for the political actual ads transparency for the political actual ads database I was talking about the API and the fact that we extended also at targeting it looks like that and I know that it's a conference of experts so it's fair to say that we've also included the detailed targeting categories that are now very much transparent and it's a direct lesson learned from various situations that we've observed while dealing with dynamics around the elections and electoral ads so these days if political parties or basically any actor is using detailed targeting categories like lookalikes or custom audiences based on specific lists of people this is publicly disclosed for seven years in the ad library and also on the ad level it can be disclosed to any researcher that is vetted by us I'll skip the live presentation to also say some time for questions but if you are interested in more what is being done in the political actual social advertising space by meta we recommend to take this blueprint course we created it to also make sure that we do our job around the educational educational piece for political partners and there is also a very much linked knowledge hub available at facebook.com where we also extended a specific dedicated escalations channel for political partners government partners advocacy non-profits and other types of non-profits that can escalate things through that channel but also get technical help from us it's a separate escalation channel from our commercial commercial channels to make sure that we do maintain that specific focus on this categories and also you will find there a one-pager explaining this authorization process in detail thank you so much for your time I'm happy to take any questions right now if you'd like to contact me later on here's also my email address and really please that we could share a little bit about the ad transparency approach from meta during this conference thank you so much thank you Oscar and dear participant I encourage you to ask any questions while Oscar is still with us still online please don't hesitate yes I see the questions here maybe thank you very much Oscar a brief question in the past these ad libraries were only available to EU countries not Moldova how's that situation today it's available in Moldova already since more than a year I need to check the exact date but it's perfectly available working in Moldova and together with our Moldovan colleagues both from the government and also from non-profits community we do interact around data in this ad library every week to ensure that we also take some actions based on what's being reported in the ad library in case we see some concerning trends to put it that way thank you Oscar for your excellent presentation I have a question on the authorization there are I'm speaking on behalf of election observation missions we have seen a lot of paid advertisement that are running without disclaimer how is still how is the policy to take them down so of course as I mentioned we are living in a highly adversarial space and if you can game the systems for a short period if you really insist it's costly but it's possible to some extent and we are kind of a constant catch up game I would say but if we do establish that there is an advertiser or a piece of advertising that should have been declared as political actual and it's not there is a number of both automated and human reviews that are constantly monitoring the platform and whenever they actually come across such piece of ad it's being automatically stopped also the ad account is being blocked and DSR is landing in the ad library for seven years with a caption with a special label saying that this ad has been running without a disclaimer right and as long as the advertiser will not fix the authorization they will be prevented from using these outlets, these pages and from running these ads now you are perfectly right there has been an increase in mode over around the ads that has not been properly classified that is why we also made the intervention earlier this year to ensure that we gather some important data to make sure that our suppliers are more accurate and these days is very much in line with what we expect to be accurate and it's again not only our systems that are monitoring but it's also a value coming from partnerships also those that we have for instance with international idea that enabled many of our discussions in Moldova which I'm forever grateful and that we can benefit from changing important information and making this ecosystem even more safer. Thank you for your presentation my name is Anastasia, I represent Ukrainian and Jevova Civil Network and I would like to ask about the issue of currency which is available in the Facebook ads library and moreover the issue of localization of currency because in Ukrainian context it's a huge problem for us because of the difference of the prices for the advertisement and for us it's crucial to have an adjustment to the local context because there are so many ads which are being run under the $100 and that is why we have no idea how much actual money is being spent and we cannot count actual spendings during electoral campaigns as well so can we expect any progress on this matter Thank you. Of course and it's actually available right now so what you can see in the public facing interface of the ad library are the averages because these averages are made to look much more digestible for the user but actually if you go to the ad library report and download the Excel sheet you will get the exact numbers you will get the exact decimal kind of numbers of the dollars right so the same information also gets with the ad library they might be a delay up to let's say 72 hours because these systems are pretty dynamic they need to collect data from various surfaces but you can already now use this I'll be happy to share you know like the exact instruction on how to do that actually I do have email contacts to offer us so I'm pretty sure that I can do that you know still later this week if you if you're interested My name is Pavel Kostikas My name is Pavel Kostikas Good afternoon I'm deputy chair of the Central Electoral Commission Martin Can you give a sign if you are hearing the interpretation just give me a sign that you hear me First of all thank you for the presentation today as well as for the workshop organized for the Central Electoral Commission at the end of March this year and I'd like to say that this comes by eating and we started using the ad library the metal library and we've seen such challenges for us already and my question would be if if technically if it is technically possible to broaden what to make the periods more uniform for instance for us to get information early information or annual because usually we have information for political parties which is applicable for all the countries which are collected annually for every half a year and not only every three months on the date when you try to check the information so would it be complicated to do this? Of course not it's actually available daily so thanks Pavel for your question and good to see you so it is perfectly possible to access this information on a daily basis I'll be super happy to follow up with some kind of a follow up tutorial on how to access that both through the API and through the regular interface making sure it's on my to the list to share the latest knowledge and good practices on that but it's a really great question we understand that navigating a pretty novel ecosystem around ad library we have created as a first company and still learning on how to make it accessible to the user is challenging so acknowledging that and we'll make sure that the knowledge and good practices are using it are well circulated I'm really sorry I really need to run but I collected a few important follow ups and thank you so much for having us again wishing you a great conference thank you Oscar very much and we will stay in touch online thank you let me participant that you can enjoy the coffee or tea and we are still going on as President Sando has asked a very rhetorical question why it is so important to have transparency transparency for campaign online but also for campaign finance online and this is not only about the access to information automaking the inform choice for our voters but the integrity integrity of the process is at the end and with this let me give the floor to Dr Magnus Oman he is Director of Office Regional Europe office but he is also very famous specialist on political and campaign finance but also he has dealt a lot with political corruption or maybe anti-corruption issues as such I hope so much and the floor is yours thank you very much okay I want to start by clearing up what I think is a misunderstanding it is sometimes said it is often said that because most regulatory frameworks on political party and especially campaign finance do not specifically mention online advertising that means that the electoral contestants do not have to report on such expenditure that's wrong assuming that the regulatory framework has a reasonably clear definition of campaign spending contestants and if regulated non-contestant campaigners have to report on their spending also on online advertising and we're talking then about definition of campaign spending along the lines of anything spent on activities to influence the voting behavior of the electorate there are many problems that we need to deal with in terms of online advertising that's not one of them there are different issues of course a number of regulatory frameworks don't have a clear definition of campaign spending and then contestants can get away with not reporting on their spending on online advertising and on their spending on other things as well now one problem is that when legislation does not specifically deal with online advertising the legislation and the legislators don't give clear instructions or incentives to oversight institutions to develop bylaws on these issues to develop instructions to the regulated community to develop suitable reporting structures that take into account spending on online advertising and we must remember then that there are significant differences in how the payment structures works for these type of activities paying for an advert online is very different from for example paying for a TV advert you may often pay depending on the click through rates on your advert there's no equivalent to that on TV advertising and it means you cannot calculate the cost of the advert in advance this means that we need the radical changes that have been mentioned already by several speakers perhaps the largest problem is doesn't lie with legislation directly it is with the monitoring of us and advertising if contestants and sometimes less frequently non-contestants but used to be called third parties have to report on their spending on online advertising how can public institutions so we have several of them represented in the room today election commissions or anti-corruption bodies audit offices or others control this how can civil society groups control the accuracy of these reports and I refer to what Barbara was saying earlier about the importance of enforcement and I'm hoping that we can spend most of the time today and tomorrow talking about how can we enforce these rules and discuss about what should the rules be themselves it's clear that there's a lot we don't know about this topic compared to many other times when a lot of us meet in rooms a bit like this and talk about specific issues to do with money in politics this is an area where a lot of us haven't really come very far yet it's an area where a lot of us are kind of starting out like many organizations here today and I refer to what Sam was talking about the research the international idea is carrying out IFS is also implementing research on this issue including a detailed review of existing regulations in 40 countries worldwide in this case the largest detailed compilation of legal regulatory provisions and disclosure forms and structures on political pricing to date there is a surprising range in how this is being regulated there isn't a single trend taking shape as of yet and that's important to discuss when we're talking about good practices perhaps that isn't surprising though we should expect less copy and paste legislation when there are fewer examples to copy from but I want to just mention a few recommendations based on the research and actually this work is relevant to the issue of good practices in online campaign finance you can't ban it probably entirely banning online advertising would be found acceptable by the European Court of Human Rights if we draw on the fact that they have in the past found bans on television online advertising in different countries not to constitute in the view of the court a violation of freedom of expression as in article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to ban it entirely I'm worried that we would see a significant increase in hidden online advertising and they would have in fact reduced transparency it's important to make whether in whatever format it is that the requirements to report on online spending, sorry on campaign spending includes spending on online advertising and related costs there's a lot of related costs in relation to just the ad itself Oscar talked about the labelling of adverts on advertising on meta it also needs to be clear that all online adverts in whatever format need to be labelled as being paid adverts and showing who paid for them as much as possible and it gets a bit tricky here we should be able to ascertain from financial reporting what was spent specifically on online advertising on what online adverts this is also something Barbara mentioned that we need to then be able to compare the data for meta with what is being reported by political entities to be able to verify the accuracy of those reports another thing for us to bear in mind there are many areas that we should consider for regulation in terms of part in campaign finance it may not be possible to regulate everything it may not be a good idea to regulate everything given the centrality of political parties and election campaigns and elections in our democracies sometimes some things we may not want to regulate and I always mention the rule of thumb don't introduce a rule if you don't know how we can monitor compliance with it and how we can sanction violations but the fact that we may decide not to regulate certain areas can never be used as an excuse not to consider if this area should be regulated and if so how it should be regulated I want to end my comments by talking about one important resource in our joint work regarding online advertising and that's the online campaigning transparency community of practice which was launched last year focuses on promoting transparency and accountability in this area this community which is facilitated by our first brings together specialised practitioners researchers and regulators at the forefront of academic policy and regulatory discussions in this area with 33 member organisations from 26 countries including Elections Canada UK Electoral Commission Tactical Tech New York University Adobe Observatory who targets me this community provides first an influential network and benefits membership include access to this growing community of experts virtual working sessions and the eligibility for research and project funding as well as in person events I'm going to end by mentioning two very soon upcoming events by the end of July the end of this month will be a virtual session with who targets me a group based in UK and they will demonstrate how they can monitor and track online spending in 20 different countries next week there will also be a session about online disclosure on online spending with a guide that showcases disclosure forms and practices on online campaigning specifically and this guide will serve as public resources offering guidelines and good practices on the issue of disclosure forms for transparency on online expenditure that will be the next week we don't actually have the exact date as someone mentioned this is happening basically as we're talking if someone is interested in the online campaigning transparency community of practice just please talk to me afterwards the participants don't hesitate to ask the questions if you have please feel free maybe if not yet let's continue our discussion let me give the floor to the engine of our conference she has invested a lot into the happening of this conference together with her colleagues but she is also representing international idea which is famous for not only for methodology development of methodology of observation but also technical assistance to different components of electoral processes so Yulia please thank you Alexi and just before I start first of all welcome to everyone thanks a lot for coming it's a great pleasure to see many friends but also to see new colleagues and new faces and on the organizational part as we are running late I'm not original by saying this but we've mentioned this and we decided this organizer to postpone the lunch for half an hour so by this I highly encourage you actually to grab some coffee and maybe some food in order to survive to our so please serve yourself and I hope that someone will help me with the presentation as I don't want to repeat what my colleagues both Magnus Barbara we are saying but when preparing this conference we decided that it would be important first of all to overview what is the status quo in terms of actual international regulations standards but also best practices in terms of online campaign and as many of you are coming from OCOD region where OCOD will be actually observing how central electoral commissions within our region and political finance oversight agencies within our region overseeing and monitoring online campaign finance we believe that it is important to at least to list what international standards exist and are applicable and so that it will give you some kind of understanding what ODIR will be looking when they will come in order to assess your compliance with these standards and as already Magnus mentioned there is no explicit standard on online campaign finance but it doesn't mean that it's not regulated at all at the international level and there are many of different provisions of international documents that are regulating the certain aspects of this issue and of course we want to start with article 7.3 of the UN convention against corruption which is focused on transparency of campaign finance which is important basis for online campaign finance which is just an aspect of campaign finance and we also want to raise your attention to the article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which is introducing limitations on campaign finance expenditures because at the end of the day why are we looking at all these issues we are interested in reducing the role of money in politics and ensuring level playing field so that most political parties and candidates are able to campaign freely and in this regard we also want to focus a little bit on OCE documents and first of all on the Copenhagen document paragraph 7.7 is focusing on free and fair campaigning and conditions that should be ensured in order to have this free and fair campaigning but also paragraph 7.6 mentioning equal treatment for campaigning so meaning that state institutions should actually treat equally political parties and candidates so if you introduce any of the regulations and my colleague Nana Kalandadze in the second session will talk more about different models of national legislation but at the same time it's just important to keep in mind that if you apply this rule they should be applicable equally to all candidates and political parties so that we can actually then have the main goal so we do not need to forget about the main goal of these regulations actually to maintain quality of opportunity and reducing the influence of money in politics and transparency and accountability our key guiding principles and we also just briefly want to touch base on Council of Europe recommendations from 2018 it is mostly focused on intermediaries or social media platforms just to be simpler in terms of terminology saying that first of all the role of social media is growing but also acknowledging that social media platforms may have their own rules and regulations and it's just normal because they are private entities and they may have their own regulations and just the matter how it is then applicable and how it is then in line with the national legislation but also recommendation from 2022 which is more focused on electoral communication and media coverage and it is mostly focused on campaign finance but also in terms of creating actualism surrounding and ensuring equality for campaign at the same time European Union is also trying to think how to deal with the issues of online campaigning and it's a long standing issue within EU and some of you represent actually European Union countries so these new regulations hopefully will be applicable to you but many of you actually represent countries with EU approximation so once Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia Armenia I don't know who has this aspiration will join you. Such regulations could be also applicable to your countries but even now you can take a look at this because they are quite standard and interesting in terms of what best practices you can already take from this. So in November 2021 the European Commission proposed a draft regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising and what are the most important issues to understand about this new regulation. First of all the process of negotiation is quite long so it was expected that it was supposed to be adopted last month it is still under negotiation and we hope that it will be adopted sometime soon. European Union is aiming to adopt it prior to the European Union elections next year so hopefully these regulations will come soon. It is focused on political ads providers and data controllers so those that are targeting, ensuring targeting and amplification of political ads. Mostly I would say these are the regulations for big tech companies and social media platforms. So these regulations are not related to political parties so they are not regulating the activities of political parties. Simply providers of such service. And also what is important by these regulations first of all they acknowledge that there is no common understanding of what is political ads and if you would look at different policies of different social media platforms you will see that many of them have quite different understanding what is political ads and very good question for you. And I guess from Francesca in terms of why we are still seeing some posts that are not labeled as political ads and the answer is quite simple because there is different understanding what is political ads and if something is not considered as political ads then of course it is not labeled as political ads so this new regulation is somehow explaining what is political ads but also what is important is regulating place in political ads not just by political parties but also on behalf of political parties. And this is reference to what Magnus just said on third parties whether they are placing these political ads and how to control and to measure all these and also these new regulations will introduce transparency notice so that all users when they are seeing actually political ads they should and they should recognize that first of all this is political ad but also who plays why plays who paid for this what was the target audience for placing this and why actually they have seen this campaign. And as you see on the screen Article 8 will require big tech companies and social media platforms to report on how much they actually earn on political ads but what we should keep in mind just for ourselves that big tech companies they are not earning much on political ads comparatively to commercial ads so it just very little market comparatively to commercial ad and also within this regulation Article 16 is focusing on sanctions that countries should introduce and we will be talking on this later during the day and special European board for digital services will be established as advisor with advisory function which will be basically in touch with all the political finance oversight agencies from the region and this regulation also by the way introduce the obligatory mechanism of oversight designated oversight body that should be responsible for monitoring and overseeing this and this European board for digital services will be guiding such political finance oversight agencies but also it will require them to notify within 12 months in advance on your regulation so it's also in line with Venice commission code of food practice on electoral matters that electoral changes shouldn't be introduced later than one year which is not the case in most of our countries unfortunately and hopefully this will also bring some new dynamics to this. Thanks a lot I will not keep you longer and will be happy to answer your questions if any. Questions maybe let me shortly present not a position but the situation in which audio office democratic constitution and human rights is now currently with regards to observing the campaign finance especially campaign finance online that's true as several speakers already have mentioned there are no explicit standards there are no really black and white standards against which we could assess whether the state or political stakeholders are playing with the rules but as I have mentioned already the main probably two main words which we are keeping in mind when assessing the process is actually are the transparency and the integrity and as Magnus has mentioned very fairly we are in a difficult position to see to ensure and to take into account the good balance between self-expression everybody is free to campaign and to impart their information unless they breach the international law the freedom to campaign as well including online is also an absolute or maybe even golden standards for any elections it's very important for us to understand and actually to take into account the freedom to participate in elections both for campaigners but also for the voters with their right to first of all look for to find the information to impart the information whatever information is maybe it could be let's put it either aggressive or maybe less objective for somebody but still the freedom to participate and to participate in the elections is of utmost important for us another challenge for ODIR especially during election observation activities to catch actually the main processes because as you and especially political parties who are present here know very much that if you are very good player and if you plan your activities well in advance your campaign strategies the political parties start all preparations and all the machinery way before the call elections or at least if they want to win the elections but also what is important the accountability the information the official information about how much money was collected how much money was spent for the elections is given usually quite late after the election which is fine no problem with this but this creates let's say technical or maybe practical challenges for us for ODIR because by that time and Barbara is acknowledging she has been in this difficult position several times when we are leaving the country and have to release the report the information is not yet there but still we are taking into consideration the main principle the consparency and integrity ability of voters to get the information to know of who is standing behind the resources and actually the support of political parties and whether they are equal or maybe with about opportunities for all to participate in elections so any questions, comments please then let's make a short technical break in order to set up the next session thank you for your attention in Washington I arise election integrity technical practices focuses on building new frameworks for international observers and citizen observers to analyze contemporary issues to electoral integrity including flows of dark money in elections for that reason it's a privilege to be among so many experts here this week including those on this panel who I will introduce in a moment this panel focuses the discussion will focus on the regulatory frameworks for governing political finance and regulation is as we've heard this morning very important and necessary function to ensure political finance transparency and accountability but it is a balance between transparency and you know balancing fundamental freedoms with that in mind we are quite interested to hear from our distinguished panelists about the trends challenges and solutions to regulating political finance both on and offline including developments in Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine so without further ado in the interest of time because we are running a little behind we're going to hear from all of our panelists first and then we will take questions at the end so as a reminder we have five minutes each five to seven but five minutes each so if you could be very succinct in your remarks I think everybody we would appreciate that okay so first I think we'll hear from Olesia Stamat Miss Olesia is a member of parliament and chair of the committee for legal affairs, immunities and appointments and the parliament of the Republic of Moldova Miss Stamat the floor is yours Good day Honored audience distinguished audience their colleagues their guests I think this conference comes in a very appropriate time in the context of the general local elections that are pending in the Republic of Moldova take place later this year followed by two other electoral cycles next year and one year later and ensure in transparent legal finance of campaigns and political parties was formed first from the very beginning of the current government and parliament I want to mention that from the very beginning of home and date we've intervened by making legislative amendments mechanism of investigation insufficient sanctioning of electoral abuse and as an example I want to provide that the penal code and the misdemeanor code were amended and now provide for infractions for illegal finance and other electoral frauds and a new electoral code developed by the colleagues from the Central Electoral Commission about it in parliament contains a number of provisions on the prohibited sources for finance to in the campaign we've mentioned the recent decision of the constitutional court declaring the non-constitutionality of a political party by this resolution the fact that non-transparent systematic and continuous character of such finance threaten the principles of rule of law sovereignty and dependence of a country so the court stated the respective party in a conscient way and in transparently used funds, illegal funds to impart a democratic processes and diminish or undermine the state still call it in order for this court resolution to be adopted there was a need to provide a number of evidence and the Electoral Commission so had to provide information on abuse in the compliance and exclusion of some candidates of this party from the electoral campaign but also the material from the investigation authority on accumulation of non-transparent sources, respectively it's a certain fact that the difficulty in investigating such processes are put on the law enforcement authority in this sense and the capacity of this institutions should be strengthened which should be done at legislative level we are doing but the capacity of implementing institutions should be strengthened so we can provide sufficient implementation enforcement the topic of the discussion focuses on the online campaign finance and this is a newer challenge with regard to the monitoring of electoral finance which becomes more and more of today so I'd like to provide some figures on the use and the trust of the population in social media according to a study published by the social media is the second most often times used source of information used by the citizens in 2022 there was a 1% difference from the TV stations so among the interviewers 59% used the TV on a daily basis to get information from while 58% of the population used the social media compared to the previous year the respondents would use by two times the share increased of those who use the news sites to get information 42% in 2022 versus 20% into 2020 so the popularity of the social media networks is not only just in terms of social information but also the trust in terms of the trust in them respectively important aspect of the electoral campaign finance is transparency transparency is essential for the donation and expected to be made public and easy to access likewise in the case of traditional finance or electoral campaigns so with regard to monitoring oversight of the correctness of data included in the financial statements so there are several challenges that we can see on the surface but there might be even more of them I'd like to mention a few anonymous character and difficulty to identify the donors online it is more easy for the donors to hide the real identity or to hide so finance from foreign sources the online allows the finance to come from foreign or outside sources that may pursue different goals for instance YouTube 30% of the Moldova views they to get informed and doesn't mourn advertisements in Moldova so and they can buy ads in the neighbouring countries which raises a lot of suspicion or concern about the possibility of finance by foreign entities so online public ads and micro targeting so quickness and big volume of data the online environment provides a big volume of data within a short time it is difficult to disclose the suspect finance and the irregularities which represent a big challenge so the analysis algorithms should be robust and efficient in order to manage the volume and the speed of data and finally collaboration with online platforms it is obvious that in order to monitor and regulate the finance of online ads the authorities should closely collaborate with digital platforms and social media networks but actually all the national legislation that your framework provides for the finance of electoral campaigns there are no provisions specific provisions on the activity of legal entities to carry out online promotion activities and such practices are not subject to any limits of transparency requirements and this gap is exploited by some political parties and even some foundations carrying out activities in line with the agenda of political parties so I would like to mention online that this event is very welcome and timely we have a lot to learn from each other and we do expect we are looking forward for the conclusions and discussions the conclusions formulated as a result of the discussions in this conference so and we will be looking forward for the third report of the Consultative Intercorruption Committee which is spending publication on this exact topic finance of political parties and of campaigns in Moldova and in the context of today's event as well as of this report that is spending communication is obvious that the parliament of Moldova within its limit of the competence will intervene whenever necessary in order for us to be able to regulate online finance of electoral campaigns thank you. Alicia in addition to being a member of parliament is also a lawyer and political scientist with over 15 years of experience in the legal field focused on legal reform and governance and she has also served as an advisor to the president on judicial issues thank you for your remarks next we have Ms. Nanna Kalandadze who is the program manager for regional Europe at international idea and who leads the institutes initiatives in the eastern partnership region Nanna has over 20 years experience designing and managing democracy assistance initiatives and we're delighted to give her the floor thank you. Thank you Jessica and I know you're doing it very right but Bacchan I did not want to take your place let me just do this quickly yes very very happy delighted that this event is taking place it did take a lot of coordination but we're all very excited on behalf of all the partners that we were able to have you all have all of our prominent policymakers social society all of you here of course lawmakers just to recap we have participants from the key context of this roundtable was to review the activities and progress in Moldova Ukraine Armenia Georgia and of course we then also have the neighbors who are events already on this work but we nevertheless of course wanted to learn from them so we have Bosnia we have Latvia, Lithuania Romania and I don't know if I'm forgetting anyone but anyway so my task here to talk about a bit more about the regional trends and then of course defer to our prominent national speakers to really discuss the details of the national national developments let me just take a quick moment to say before we delve into the online details and the dynamics of the online campaigning now that this is a relatively new field for the region about 10 years I think and Marcin will remember this and I think many of you will remember when the region all the four countries started to develop their a bit more expanded articles from political parties laws and electoral laws into something more consolidated this was maybe 2011 2012 and this was just going to start the process of consolidating the legal frameworks for the non-digital linear media exactly that's when the digital expansion happened around 2015-2016 and so basically the point being that the challenge the digital challenge was overlaid on the existing challenges that were still left behind from the this new field of regulation right yeah so and then let me also say that generally about the regulation we're talking about this is quite a densely regulated region when it comes to the mainstream traditional media non-digital media right so we have various types of bands or limits on donations that parties can receive we have all the countries here have certain but largely the overall caps and limits on expenditure there is there are a variety of regulation on foreign funding there is public funding gender sensitive public funding so that has been more than that of course the in a way the most daunting challenge still remain to be the most difficult issues such as the really the increasing the oversight capacities and the ability to have the advance commission usually puts it substantive and proactive oversight as well as some of the more tricky issues that I think we will discuss during the session 6 which is a third party campaign for example but so generally well regulated region however is not on the issues that relate to online and so the approach until now has been that well what we have on non-digital linear media related campaigning can just be extended and can just apply to the digital space sort of assuming that all the actors would take this as is and would implement it in a good space that would happen let me also still say that so as I mentioned I think generally the region is still basing it's political finance framework on the overall limits of spending rather than itemized limits on the online related spending but we know that in the digital space digital age less money is needed less money ensures more wider and deeper penetration so therefore the question is really can the overall large high spending limits can they defend our democracies the way they did well arguably they did in the non-digital era so just a question and I think this is basically what we've been also examining in the past sessions a little good things happening and part of it is of course related to online and enables better online regulation part of it is yeah generally just the underlying factors which is that of course I think the this round table and all of you here is a testament that there's an increasing realization that the existing just the sort of linear media regulation cannot simply be automatically extended but it needs indeed modernized a new approach to online campaign regulation there is there are also steps made into the direction right unless I just told us about this in Moldova the CEC has taken the leadership on understanding how and what it needs to change looking into the variety of methods and for the neighbors such as with Benjala I do provide that method with the examples there is also of course a bit of maybe an unappreciated fully unappreciated but still an important process which is the reporting is becoming increasingly more digital in Moldova in Ukraine of course, in Georgia, in Armenia perhaps not fully digital fully searchable fully user friendly but it's happening and clearly the direction of travel is the right one and of course important to mention that all of these places have very very dynamic civic space that pushes for this and we have representatives of these organizations that really deserve a separate session and will have that last but not least the oversight models are evolving Georgia is one example where the oversight function just transferred from the audit office to the dedicated independent anti-corruption body hopefully that's going to be effective to implement the expectations Armenia has had some changes of course Moldova is considering its functions and expanding the department for finance and Ukraine of course has had great success after a certain period of problematic first initial years of Nazakha but now really going full speed so that's all good I think I still have maybe one minute I want to draw this is going to be longer but let me just take you to one important study that we have recently started and it will come out soon this is called winning the right way and it's going to present the comparative practices among the EU member states on how the commercial online advertisement is regulated we identified four models and we think that the region now fits between the number two and number three where basically the well political advertising regulation is limited selected media is not explicitly covered and transitioning into the context three which is that generic political advertising regulations also apply to online political advertising but perhaps some of the sentiments that we are hearing and needs to be considered is whether it should and can transition into where I think the EU member states seem to be going which is that modernized online sensitive dedicated legislation let me just say that the features of that would be definitions and the scope of what is online campaigning in online advertisement identification and transparency at libraries at pricing published platform responsibilities defined and the purchaser responsibilities defined I think I want to take a little bit more than that the best summary is the context number four is probably where we are thinking this should all go into. Thank you so much Nanna. Apologies I know we are moving through this quickly but hopefully you all have an opportunity to engage these panelists at the lunch break we have Neslina chairperson of the central electoral commission of Lithuania she is also an experienced expert in the organization and conductive elections and in particular the financing of political parties so thank you the floor is yours. Thank you I am very happy to be here in this conference this time in and I am happy to see all colleagues and I have presentation I cannot see yet so I work in central electoral commission of Lithuania and our commission conducts all kinds of elections and also controls over funding of political parties and participants we have mixed system in Lithuania so political organizations and the candidates participate in elections and we have two types of political organizations but the regulation is similar so I speak more about political parties the regulation of financing of political campaigns is a subject of election and the activity of political organizations is regulated by separate law but both legal acts the stipulated legal sources of financing and limits of donations legal expenditure and limits of political campaign expenditure accounting and disclosure rules requirements for political advertising the oversight by CEC and other institutions and the use of information system to collect to verify and publish data on financing of political campaigns and political parties and we use the information system here you can see the main groups of users of our information system so you can see political parties participants of campaign, media of advertising, independent auditors all of them are entering information to our information system we collect this data and CEC and other institutions analyze this data and we also have links to different registers like residents legal entities, members of parties to check the information and also we have a link to state tax inspectorate and all information is published on our website and I should distinguish two rules of our information system of course it is collect information it is control if requirements are followed but I think the second one is more important it is an assistance to political parties and to participants of political campaign to give them an information about donations about donors if they have a right to donate if limits are followed because we have limits for donations it is total amount and it is according to the declared income of donors so all this information is given in our information system and it assist it helps to avoid breaches or mistakes because of lack of information and we have limits for expenditure of political campaign it depends on election how much we can how much political parties and candidates can spend and as Magnus said in Lithuania we have a new special regulation for online campaign but we treat it as a part of all political campaign as a part of political advertising so every time we control political campaign costs also and we have some gross violation which are related to our limits for example if political party exceeds the limit in 10% then we have gross violation of election food and we have quite strong sanctions for it so there are some different limits for this and the cost of political advertising it is about 85% of all campaign expenditure so we have to pay special attention to monitoring of political advertising and below define some requirements for political advertising like equal prices for participants labeling political advertising some restrictions silence period and since last year the election court has introduced new rule for political campaign participants who use social media platforms to promote read messages we must declare read accounts before sponsoring messages and we have to reveal the names of persons who are responsible for managing these accounts and who are paying for this from which account we pay for this advertising and the law prescribes that they have to monitor political advertising during regular election which we have in all country we procure procedure of monitoring during all election electoral commissions now electoral commissions they monitor political advertising in very region about very candidates and also complaints and notification received by all levels of electoral commission is treated as a part of of monitoring of political advertising and we use the CCUs as libraries which are publicly accessible on internet and we monitor the social media spending for example we compare the reports from Facebook at library before and after election period we calculate the differences of amount spent in Facebook and number of ads in library of course it takes time to pick up pick out the report about participants of political campaign it's not so easy as Oscar told us before but we managed to do it and the total amount are not accurate in case we are below 100 euro and if you work with one single message it's not so easy to know their price but we will use this information using these libraries we detect not only and declared the expenses just for social media but sometimes for outdoor advertising sometimes for meeting the orders because we have a lot of information we publish and we can check if they declare the post for outdoor advertising and so on and here you can see the amount of information and our information system since the last election in March we had the municipal elections and elections of May so we had 262 participants of political campaign who had separate campaigns, separate accounts, separate reports you can see that participants entered more than 72,000 of records on bank transfers, donations and voices, political advertising contracts the total income was more than 8,2 million euro expenditure 8,3 million euro and the media provided us more than 7,000 records about advertising monitoring groups more than 15,500 so now independent owners have checked already these reports now we are evaluating their reports and analyzing political advertising and information system helps us because it has a tool which summarizes a huge amount of information we have more than 57,500 records about political advertising and information system summarizes more than 4,200 rows for different columns and it helps us to assess differences in prices and costs in the amount of political advertising and we see the differences we can quickly look through detailed information and it helps us to find the undeclared expenditure and sometimes illegal financing for this expenditure and of course, evaluating the information about campaign and social media and more attention because of very small prices for the same amount of money we have a lot of checks a lot of documents for example during last election our participants have declared that we spent for Facebook only 4% of all advertising costs but if you see the reports of political advertising it is 32% of all records 8 times more so you can see really we need more time for it and the problem is if we have a case when some of expenditures are declared but not all so sometimes it is quite complicated to recognize which really message is included in which invoice and really we need more time and I am happy to know about some courses online I look to see how we can use it and then we find undeclared expenditure every time we check if it was paid and if it was paid if a candidate or political party paid for it or some legal entity which is forbidden in Lithuania or some fat parties and in this case we also investigate and in all times we see decisions to append reports of political campaign and we put expenditures and we put donations and we look if limits we are following if there are no breaches so information system allows us not only to publish financial reports but also to check and evaluate them to detect different violation of law as I said illegal financing and declared donations or expenditure exceeded limits and last but not least benefit of our information system is a prevention or assistance to avoid mistakes or breaches because of lack of information so if you have any question I think I am not in time but maybe during coffee break I will answer Thank you so much I failed to mention that Madam Chairwoman was recently appointed as Chairperson of the CEC so congratulations Next we have Mr. Andrei Yevstinyev member of the Central Electoral Commission of Ukraine Mr. Yevstinyev also worked as an advisor to MPs of Ukraine and has had many roles in Ukrainian politics so without further ado the floor is yours Thank you very much Thank you very much for an invitation to this top level event Thank you very much for our friends from different countries for your support we appreciate it a lot and it's a great pleasure for me in person to be here and to represent Ukrainian people and Ukrainian CEC today here in Voldova As I noticed due to previous speech of our colleagues the problem of online campaigning and the problem of control over funds spent for online campaigning is a common problem for everybody for every country which is represented by those who are here in this hall and it is a problem for Ukraine too and it is a great opportunity for us to get some additional information about your experience about your steps on a difficult path to providing really effective control over such funds and to guarantee that the majority or maybe not all but the majority total majority of funds in particular during electoral process are created by money which are really legal money and of course we are trying to improve our legislation too I want to thank you very much so according to our election code online campaigning is one of the types of campaigning which can be used by the candidates on all types of elections including national we have two types of such elections they are presidential and parliamentary and on the local elections too I want to pay you attention that we have no direct or specific regulations in our legislation concerning online campaigning so we use the same requirements which are enshrined in our electoral legislation and which can be used for other types of campaigning in particular they are I want to pay you attention to some of them the most important to my mind expenses for online campaigning must be made from election funds candidates they are parties or individuals must display information on expenses on such expenses in the interim and final reports of the use of election funds we have rather detailed regulations concerning such reports and concerning their monitoring and control and the third one position is that posting or distribution of election campaign materials in electronic media which are not marked in accordance with the requirements of the code is prohibited to my mind it is also rather important regulation the first position is that all expenses for online campaigning must be made from the election funds is in a direct connection with the requirements of our electoral legislation concerning creating of such funds and for example candidates for presidential post candidates to our parliament and candidates on local elections have to or can create such open bank accounts and create their electoral funds on it and only if candidate has an account and has some amount on it he or she can use it for online for online campaigning I want to not to inform you with extra information so I am trying to decrease the number of information so what I can I want to tell you more we have a special regulation as I have mentioned for the interim and final financial reports and all the candidates all candidates on all types of elections who use election funds have a obligation to prepare and to submit such reports and there is there are special procedures concerning all types of elections according to which such reports have to be overviewed and this is one of the forms of control over such funds unfortunately for today we are only on our path to digitalization of this process and we and our colleagues from national agency for corruption prevention of Ukraine we have the same position that digitalization in this sphere is the only way to provide and to guarantee really effective control over electoral funds and over expenses from such funds for online political advertising so we are trying to go this way for this moment and it should be noted that the Central Election Commission of Ukraine actively participated and still participates in different working groups created in Ukrainian parliament created or consisted from representatives of civil society organizations or representatives of our international partners and we are trying to really to prepare proposals which can be used by our parliament to improve a sphere of online electoral advertising and control over funds in this sphere. In particular some of our proposals were written in the resolution of our commission from November 11, 2019 but unfortunately for today our parliament didn't adopt such proposals we hope that it will be and it will be rather soon and in the end I want to tell you that of course we have no powers to adopt laws we can adopt only regulations and in one of our regulations in 2020 we introduced a separate line item post-election campaign materials on the internet in the interim and final financial reports and all the candidates used these forms of reports then they submitted them to respective bodies and we think that it may be a little contributes to the openness and publicity of political financing. Thank you very much sorry for a little bit thank you so much thank you thank you okay next we have Mr. Alexandru Mostiata he is the director of security and intelligence service of Moldova prior to his role at the intelligence service Mr. Mostiata served at the central election commission of Moldova held numerous positions in country for the source foundation and director of good governance Mr. Mostiata, the floor is yours thank you very much for the introduction and for your invitation to participate in this very important conference I have listened to what the previous speakers shared a lot of opinions a lot of great ideas a lot of good practices I will try to be I will actually be a little bit pessimistic I think so within the intelligence field those working in the intelligence field like me we are a little bit pessimistic and this is why pardon me for this approach. We have a few issues in this field first of all the regulatory framework is like a vivid organism which is constantly in change because sometimes what we regulate today by the parliament can be outdated tomorrow and tomorrow a very good lawyer for example can continue its illegal activity by interpreting the law in a certain way the second thing is that the regulation it doesn't matter how detailed it goes the biggest problem is the illicit activity because you understand that as long as you do illicit things this is automatically excluding an illegal provisions so in that sense in the prosecutor's office we are talking a lot about this subject it is a challenge indeed so I am new in the field of intelligence and I talk a lot with my colleagues and they are telling us about the infringements that are happening and they have a principle they say if you find illegality try to find the money stream and of course in this sense the financial illegalities are quite often we have identified a lot of illicit money flows in this political processes the money are coming first of all through very doubtful sources a lot of money comes cash into the country sometimes it's for paying people that work in the field sometimes it's for paying people that are having different trolling activities online sometimes it's about people that are specifically appointed to generate content on telegram channels and we speak about some channels that are quite well regulated so it's not the regulation of those platforms let's take tiktok all of them all of those platforms they have very good established interaction with law enforcement entities in the Republic of Moldova the biggest disinformation misinformation campaigns are done through this social media platform which is called telegram and it is indeed a huge issue in our country and from what I know this is a big issue not only in our country also money come from money laundry through different supporters of certain political parties donation is the most popular word that they use in this context sometimes we encounter situations when people found out that they became sponsors for a political party without them even knowing about that there are analytical programs that can identify that information and there are a lot of surprises there and sometimes people are asked to make a certain donation and also there are unfortunately in the Republic of Moldova the regulatory framework for the circulation of cash money is very very poor it is very difficult to prove something here and there are industries that are fully focused on cash money and unfortunately this interferes a lot with the election process also the elicit financing which is very difficult to be regulated is also through social projects through foundations, social campaigns that are initiated sometimes during the election processes or just before the initiation of an election campaign and of course we speak about big amounts of money there and also undeclared political advertisement we already talked about that and of course there is no taxation there when it's uncontrolled the audio visual is regulated is well regulated but we speak about broadcasting, radio but when it comes to online in the Republic of Moldova it's not regulated meaning that a lot of things that are happening in the online environment I have big doubts about the fairness and transparency and it's a huge huge responsibility to try to monitor all the processes in order to keep the things clean so yep so you have one minute we had a few attempts to try to regulate the online but unfortunately all of them those attempts were not functionable of course we have a lot of consultancy from the international so called experts so there are some experts that are offering some consultancy and our investigation shows that those people are connected with secret services of those countries and also the proxy environment first party involvement corruption there is a lot of things to be mentioned but because I don't have time I'll stop here maybe you have some other questions meantime media platforms share the same values or have policies to promote transparency so thank you for your candor last but certainly not least we have Mr. Marcin Mr. Wilecki a senior resident country director for NDI in Ukraine he is an expert in democracy and governance he has a wealth of experience managing programs as chief of democratic governance with OSCE and ODIR for over 10 years he was also the executive director for the European partnership for democracy and a senior advisor for political finance for IFIS he is an accomplished author and co-author of many handbooks and research papers on political finance and he is also very astute at summarizing reactions from panelists and providing some closing remarks so thank you so much thank you Jessica this is our secret plan to actually have me the last one to basically conclude the work for all those organizations starting with the Central Action Commission in Moldova IDEA OSCEO ODIR IFIS and NDI Council of Europe is missing which is an important partner I would like to basically start maybe looking at the last 25 years and some reflections it was exactly 25 years ago I have organized the first conference on money in politics in Poland and so one of the most fascinating reflections I would have is I have worked in Moldova since early 2000 the remarks of Madame President are the best accomplishment to all of us you know what she said today about this authentic democracy such a profound understanding of the challenges of money in politics in this region this is the best illustration that this format, that our partnership that Moldova and all other countries made an enormous progress and another thing where I am particularly proud of when we were discussing it 10 years ago 20 years ago it was exclusively men and if you look at the composition of this panel even the composition of participants now we have a true gender balance and gender equality when it comes to discussing money in politics that's another true accomplishment over the last 20 years there are few more but I will also be very humble and I will also be very humble and I would like to focus on few challenges lessons learned and challenges but definitely I totally agree with Magnus you know like Kevin Kasasamora used to say what we are doing is exercise in damage limitation we will always be behind we will always try to regulate the things which are happening which are worrying us and we should also be humble when it comes to too many rules too little enforcement too little capacity so five things I would like to propose especially when it comes to online campaigning and controlling online campaign finance is capacity building of regulated community we have focused very much on regulators we really have to bring political parties back and I know that we will have this panel after the lunch what we've missed is there was a lot of focus on building capacity of regulators of civil society we have not done the same level of capacity building and involving into discussion political parties and we made some other major mistakes over the last 20 years too often we've been looking at political parties as a main offenders and as Madame President mentioned today we have to look at political parties as victims victims of oligarchy capture victims of foreign influence in many of our countries political parties are really victims of political corruption and we need to assist them and help them in our future discussions really more focus on regulated community and political parties another very important term development concern for me we are living in a transition period no doubts it was mentioned Madame Member of Parliament in Moldova but definitely in Ukraine social media in Ukraine social media now number one source of information not number two and telegram 67% of media consumption is happening from telegram 45% of the information is coming from telegram so we are seeing decentralization of media and we are seeing multiple actors actually operating in political communication which is a huge challenge for us when we are discussing regulations what we are also seeing is when it comes to political campaigning a very interesting process we actually used to regulate political campaigns and political finance on the national level and what we are seeing an enormous presence of social media on a hyper local level very localized campaigns and also very national and international campaigns especially international campaigning is worrying me because we still think about campaign finance, political finance regulations as a product of a state and we have to start accepting the fact that more and more political communication would be happening at the international level I would like to thank my colleague definitely the same assessment of risks telegram for sure something to be worrying about PR professionals who are paid by the state companies this is a huge problem in Poland in my own country abuse of state resources is happening through state companies and other agents paying for social media activists social media professionals foreign influence tomorrow I have some data to present on what is happening in this region and political violence that's another thing which worries me if you look at the PACE Council of Europe report on political violence against women 83% of women politicians being attacked through social media through online campaigning so that's another thing which we need to pay more attention to you know just to wrap up few suggestions definitely there is a room for political parties on codes of conduct on helping political parties to address those regulatory challenges second thing is we have to keep in mind that every time we are regulating inclusion needs to be something we should have in mind online campaigning can also exclude and we need to be looking at those vulnerable groups which are not participating in online campaigning and when we are regulating money in politics we have to keep inclusion in mind definitely the issue of integrity we've seen it corrupt funding of politics does not like transparency, does not like attention so risk analysis are very important and I am very grateful to our colleague who already mentioned a few of them so final two points whatever we are doing in terms of regulations we should keep in mind our main role is to inspire inspire people to participate in politics to communicate to have increase of political communication and political participation so we have to be very careful with small parties because you know big parties oligarchic parties they will always comply they can hire the best lawyers to fill their financial reports it's the challenge of those new movements of those new parties so whatever we are doing we should have this inspiration in mind and final point I don't want to ask anyone how many of you actually read recent council of Europe recommendation 2020-12 but we have a framework very ambitious framework to work on for the next 10 years in terms of international standards in terms of regulations this recent council of Europe recommendation paragraph 3 makes it very clear what needs to be regulated what needs to happen the challenge would be to make sure that political parties have a capacity resources and people to comply with that thank you very much indeed thank you so much thank you to all of our distinguished panelists I do not think we have time unfortunately for questions because we are a bit behind and we have to start promptly after lunch but I encourage you to reach out with your questions to all of our panelists if you have questions and I'm cognizant that the only thing between you and lunch is the conclusion of this panel so again thank you so much to all of our panelists and we'll hopefully continue the discussion over lunch and coffee thanks one group the lunch will be in that beautiful big building upstairs the main door and let's we can be in here at 245 thank you 245 Mr. Lebedinsky Mr. Mija are you all ready are you awake yes this is the graveyard shift it's the worst one after lunch people are falling asleep so dear panelists please be loud and be provocative so that the audience can follow and not fall asleep and now we are well my name is Martin Agibi I'm the country director for NDI Moldova I've been here for nine months I spent 25 years in conferences like this one I've been in international politics discussing these kinds of topics but I've also had a secret life I had a double life I've been a political party activist and until nine months ago I was actually the executive secretary of a party branch and a campaign manager so I've been on the other side of the regulations and I've been under-signing the reports for the controllers and I think that we're all here in this panel are the people who are being regulated and who are being inspected so I think that it's going to be interesting to see what perspectives come up now the online winning elections is about defining reality and it's about setting the agenda is this election about fuel prices they're too expensive for people or this election is about climate change and of course political parties are part of setting that agenda but as we've been speaking today there is also the third actors there is the campaigners that are not political parties who want to influence the agenda of the country so it's not only up to political parties but of course political parties are very important we have excellent panelists then if you're not in politics yourself when you have several political parties from the same country in the same conference you cannot have one of them for the others so this is a broad panel in the sense that the parties that are present actually also have to be able to say something alright so let's get to the perspectives we will start with a recorded message from the director of the political parties program of NDI Madame Bigitta Ulsson she was a minister of European affairs she was an aspiring party leader she didn't win that that particular success it's been extremely successful in politics and it's also we, Marci noted in the earlier panel that it was a mix between men and women unfortunately we cannot offer the same but at least on video Madame Bigitta Ulsson please help us with the video I'm delighted to join you virtually today from Stockholm to add a few comments from the horizon of the National Democratic Institute and the parties team but I will get to Ulsson lead since 2020 so when you discuss this topic online campaign finance for political parties you both feel very old and at the same time kind of surrounded by this deep feeling of never ending story when I got active into politics in the mid 90s my political party did not have a proper website I had no email address no mobile phone no one had heard of social media platforms or online campaigning but of course everyone had heard of dirty money in politics and why money as well as great campaigns then of course outside computers and mobile phones but did really matter and maybe we do not need to invent the wheel again but more stick to the old ethical principles of win with integrity, lead with dignity and lose with grace when we're working on this field and fully understand as our former NDI chair secretary Madeline Albright used to say all about democracy also in this field she said while democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government in the short run it's among the most fragile and that is how we need to deal with online campaigning and dirty money so how does the changing nature of online campaigning affect democracy development well I would say first we need to acknowledge the state of play for democracy at the moment it's not like in great to be frank we're in the midst of a 17th consecutive year of democratic backsliding according to freedom house VDEM reports that 42 countries in the world are in autocratization at the moment and 50% of the world's democracies are in retreat according to international idea well half of the country is measured by the economic democracy index the report either stagnated or declined and the levels of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen they're back to 1986 the year that Reagan met garbage so that is why we need to create solid robust but also democratic systems around this area one thing I wanted to mention is cross-party pledges will be effective in some environments in order to get parties to commit to more ethical campaign practices we can encourage civil society organizations to monitor such pledges and we can advocate for social media giants engaging in greater sharing of social media data for research purposes including take down requests in order to aid civil society organizations and political parties in monitoring these campaigns so should parties make a choice between campaigning online or the more old school traditional way well we need to get out of this mental box that it's either online or traditional canvassing the campaign tool or arena itself should never be the main focus the message the value and the policy that you want to encourage others to follow should always be at core in your daily work well going to online engagement well parties should recognize the growing influence of digital landscape and establish a strong online presence particularly among the younger demographics who are more likely to be active online coming to the offline grassroots outreach I personally think that the door-to-door canvassing town hall meetings and community events will never ever go out of fashion face-to-face interactions will always be the real deal for so many voters in life we need to mitigating the negative effects while the online space has negative aspects such as misinformation echo chambers and malicious actors parties can take steps to mitigate these effects by prioritizing transparency back checking and responsible use of online platforms just a few examples so where is the ideal level of regulation of online campaigning and spending well it's a very very delicate balance I would say I mean on one hand regulations are necessary to ensure transparency fairness and accountability in the political process but on the other hand it's important not to stifle volunteerism and community driven campaigning which are so key to healthy democratic systems so I want you to reflect a bit during the panel discussion that we have started first disclosure and transparency how important that is then of course the nation limits and foreign influence foreign covered financing a big big topic that we will be discussing in all countries around the world more in the coming years and also the limits on anonymous donations I mean legislation should focus on regulating large online donations but leave some space please for smaller anonymous donations in order to protect identities of citizens who may be targeted monitoring and enforcement flexibility for small scale campaigns and what is crucial here is that all actors legitimately engaged in campaigning should face a level of playing field I mean a regulation in this area should be focused on tightening loopholes and grey areas that exist in order to give all legitimate actors equal access and to add one find a comment that I hope that this panel will reflect upon always add a gender component to these discussions how is this dirty money and online campaigning this information and misinformation how is that reflected differently from women and men into political parties that is something for the panel to discuss I wish you a fruitful panel and great conversations thank you so much for inviting me to this session thank you so we have a mixed panel of offline and online I think it's good to take every second in the room to keep things in momentum so let's start also with the host country Moldova Artur Mirja is the secretary general of the ruling party the party for action and solidarity so in your perspective what is the ideal level of regulation for you both to comply and to feel safe that others are complying with ethical standards thank you Marc thank you very much to the organizers for the opportunity to discuss this sensitive subject and not only sensitive but also very interesting subject we are having now a panel discussion and I want to launch a few ideas and I would like to encourage everyone to have a brainstorming session on this so to answer to your question how regulated this sector should be we have a practice in the Republic of Moldova that actually has quite high standards and we can donate only one salary in cash and other five salaries through a transfer this is a novelty in this field but nevertheless it's still a lot of work to be done because we had a very bad reputation when it came to financing the political parties in our country okay a few hypotheses we believe that the political corruption is the mother of all other corruptions and this starts from non-transparent financing of the political parties we believe that the financing of political parties in a fair way is very important and we have here three indicators the number of donors the second is the average value of the donation and third is the level of the involvement in the process of those who donate and everything is connected here if a party has a lot of donors an average donation let's say a small donation and the very diffuse level of involvement of donors this is an authentic party I would say if the party has donors huge amounts of average donation and those donors are those that take the main decisions in the party it's obvious the party is not functioning for the people but for a certain group of people a limited group of people also I think it's very important how we collect the membership fee because for example last year a party collected 8000 membership fees and in the status of the party it is written that if you do not pay the annual fee you do not have the right to be elected and to vote and the annual fee is a very small amount it starts from half a dollar and it ends at a much higher value and you can choose today we have 6673 membership fees and we believe that it's very important for our members to confirm that they want to be members and I'm speaking about our party and I want to encourage them to remind them that they should pay the fee the annual fee for membership this is important in the former Soviet countries we believe it's very important to ensure the financing from the center from the state budget because it's an indirect financing but it comes from citizens based on the number of votes if we would not have this kind of financing the parties would start using obscure sources of financing covering very narrow interests of some individuals in the Republic of Moldova we are quite limited in terms of donation we can donate an average monthly salary cash and 5 official transfer and in this context of course all the parties should develop their online donation platforms in order for the potential donors from home, from outside the country from the diaspora to be able to support the party that they consider to worth representing their interests the election campaign the online election campaign 2021 used a lot of platforms we had a good experience with Facebook by the way they started to introduce more regulation in that sense and they started to request authentication of the ID of the people physical addresses phone numbers of those that are using this platform for political advertisement and we have other platforms fully non-transparent ones like black boxes like Google and the local online advertisement providers it's absolutely unclear who is paying for that advertisement from what sources is financed in general how the information is placed in that advertisement and of course we need more transparent platforms and they should raise at least at the level of Facebook and then we will have much more transparency also it's very important for these platforms during the election campaigns to be very responsive to be easily interactable because sometimes you know there is a political advertisement with total clarity in the background and when we reach a customer service we have to wait for a month to receive an answer and in an election campaign you cannot wait for a month and also it is very important for all the competitors in this election contest campaign to have equal access to the online platforms in the Republic of Moldova unfortunately there are still very well known platforms like Mail.ru Atna Klasniki which are suppliers of political advertisements and you know in our last election campaign the access to those platforms was blocked for some of the users because there is only one publicity only one advertisement company that was providing that kind of services and we for example as I'm speaking on behalf of my party we didn't have access they just didn't want to take our advertising on board so equal access would be something else I would encourage to do. Thank you very much Thank you so much and I hear from both the Bigita and from you that actually the online is there it's important but also old-fashioned things like membership fees canvassing and so on is actually a big part of the political what the political parties do it's not only online these days even we're in a modern world now we'll take guest speaker from online again moving to Ukraine Mr. Olexi Goncharenko member of the parliament in Ukraine for the Vatif Shlina party I hope I pronounced it right Olexi the floor is yours it has to be short about five minutes Hello to everybody I represent party European solidarity in Ukrainian parliament and not but Kishina party but yes I'm happy no worries but I'm happy to join you today from Odessa Ukraine unfortunately I did not receive a permission from the speaker of Ukrainian parliament to leave the country and to take part in these important conference but I'm happy to join you online thank you to National Democratic Institute for organizing such event the main topic is about online financing but let us start in general the word finance and money that is something probably the most sensitive but let us be frank politics is impossible without money that's the reality money is also impossible without politics and what we can say about what is the difference we have today with the huge development of online platforms and social media the difference I think is very profound and very important if before what is old politics and what is new politics old politics was when your party or you as a candidate was receiving $50,000 from one company or one man today through online instruments you are receiving the same $50,000 but from I don't know for example 50 people each from them $1,000 and that is very big difference because from this moment you as a politician of your party is not dependent just from one big donator but from a number of so you are much more transparent and this is the way to tackle political corruption or malicious lobbying or things like this and it looks very similar for me to what we see today in this war of Russian Federation against Ukraine which is the war of Putin's vertical Russian vertical against Ukrainian horizontal and horizontal is always stronger because it based on many many many many people many many many points and the same here so I think this is a huge opportunities also when they are giving their money that also changes their attitude what is going on they have more questions to you they demand from you more but at the same time they are more involved in what you are doing because they are fighting not only for you and your ideas but also for their money and that is really important I think that many people just even 10 years ago in countries like Ukraine or Odoba could not imagine that we can go switch to this type of politics with a real crowd funding but let us see the same is happening for example with video films or music 5-10 years ago Ukraine was just a pirate pirate bay with a pirate content today many many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians they use an Apple, Netflix and other platforms they are ready to pay for content and now they are starting to be ready to pay for politics and for defending their ideas too so this is opportunities they are really important but definitely there is a flip side as always and the coin has a flip side and what challenges do we have challenges are clear that online platforms also can be used by malign agents like for example Russian Federation or in a Brexit campaign for example in order to spread their messages Russia is sending through the very famous today Prygoshin and don't forget that he was also the head of a fabric of trolls in internet used by Russia to promote their messages to their disinformation and propaganda and online platforms are very vulnerable for this we should remember that also one more challenge is the great power is social networks today Facebook YouTube or TikTok has great power when they can ban you any moment and like me for example I have more than one million followers in YouTube I have hundreds of thousands followers in Facebook in Twitter, in TikTok in Instagram but also I becoming in some way dependent from these platforms if they will ban me that makes, that hurts me a lot that's why when we saw the situation with Elon Musk after he bought Twitter and now we see that Russian disinformation is starting to spread in Twitter more and that is very disturbing and that is about very big power which such networks and their owners and their managers receive over politics that is something we should think about this is about challenges let us show the next slide please I want at the end to share my personal experience I am here if you see my T-Shot it's Gondryenko centers I put on this T-Shot especially for conference because this is something which I am proud of this is the biggest in Ukraine network of educational cultural centers and what we are doing we are raising money online for our centers and also for our army just imagine today the whole Ukraine is in war everybody is in war as I told you that's the war for horizontal and our centers which were developed for learning of English language free of charge for cultural events for other languages cyber security financial literacy but today we are not doing just this but also we are fundraising for anti-drone rifles more than 70 vehicles army, drones radio stations and many other things and even just imagine I think for the first time in history educational centers bought a self-propelled orbiter it's called in Ukrainian it's carnation in English because Russians were telling that Ukrainians will meet them with their flowers in their hands so you can see this flower which is almost a 10th canon which we bought for one of our brigades and now it defends Ukrainians I think this is extremely interesting and valuable experience which I am happy to share with you thank you very much thank you, thank you and my apologies for putting you in the wrong party with Europeans over there no worries let's go back to this room which countries again we will now hear from the opposition in Moldova from the party of socialist Mr. Adrian Lebedinsky the floor is yours thank you thank you very much ladies and gentlemen I would like to thank you first of all for finding time to come here to discuss an essential problem for the Republic of Moldova but also for other countries there is no gender equality from what I see in our panel but I hope it's not a bad situation not a problem me personally in the Republic of Moldova for more than one year I refuse to watch TV first of all this is related to the fact that our audio-visual committee decided to forbid the broadcasting of some Russian speaking broadcasting channels and many of my colleagues friends they switched to the online channels somebody said that 48% of the people are following news online compared to TV classic broadcasting but I think it's much more and the trends are increasing I think the online information received by the population is going to fully replace the information that the population consumes from the broadcasting channels TV, radio station because and the national TV station and the private TV stations in our country is financed by the state budget but it promotes the actual today's party but you know some of the private televisions they are considered independent but they are financed by some grants and the question is how independent are they and it's the same exact situation with the online platforms if the financing, if the donors are supporting specific political parties they are going to openly do this Facebook, our colleagues in the previous campaigns in 2019, 2020 2021 even many times tried to make complaints against some people that were going against the legislation against the regulation of usage of those platforms and zero reaction and in the same time our colleagues from the governance they would make some complaints and immediately they would get the reply a lot of fake accounts appeared in that period a lot of trolls appeared and in that sense I think the initiative from the government is quite good to limit the access by in asking people to authorize the access with their ID and in that sense people would respect some rules and we can grant some equity I remember I was in the parliament in the commission of youth sports and cultural activity and we were examining the draft law for the informational services that had to cover not only mass media television but also the online but we had elections from 2021 and the process stopped and the draft law is still on the shelf just as an idea the concept was not even discussed I can give you also an example the election code forbids the usage of the image of state authorities and foreign personalities in the election campaigns nevertheless a lot of political competitors they used these images and you know the sanction had to be exclusion from the campaign nobody was excluded from the opposite parties and also some journalists immediately before the election campaign become investigative journalists and they start to just make a mess out of the reputation of a political competitor in the election process and then question is where is the fairness where is the transparency and you know those that are online sometimes this is the most difficult part how to find out who is financing them because sometimes those people they disappear immediately after the election process and everything ends there so if to speak about solutions for the Republic of Moldova to have equal opportunities for all the parties it doesn't matter you are in the main party in the left in the right opposition because some parties in the Republic of Moldova are supported by international funds by big sponsors by some public organizations that hold web platforms different mass media channels broadcasting TV stations but in the same time those platforms they forbid the access for other competitors so wouldn't you agree that the solution is to finally reach the adoption of the informational services in order to ensure the equal chances of accession to these services of all the candidates because by the end of the day this is a game of the money and of course we cannot fully eliminate the phenomena but my colleague including my colleague he said he said about the maximum amount that can be donated by a person but what if a person has for example an amount of $100,000 and he wants to donate and he just asks every single employee of his company to donate and here's the money, here's the whole amount so the central election committee must take care of these donations that are coming from abroad because I remember in 2020, in 2021 we received a lot of messages from citizens that are abroad telling us that people who donated they were paid by someone to do that elections from our autonomous region Gagauzia showed what is the power of cash money that is used and our colleagues from the secret information service proved that it was a problem there but they didn't manage to gather all the proofs and by the end of the day nobody was punished but it was a real situation of buying votes yes, I understand one minute we have local elections which we have all year the influence it's not that big we don't have much time we have one year until the presidential election when you have to make the rules in the finance of the online This is not the effect that we expect, but for the next year we will expect complicated projects for all of us and for the current government, so that you will not relax, because everything is not so easy. There are a lot of people who have the experience of buying a boat, and they are also online. We need to get together with the political forces to make a rule in everything that is happening. The experience of our country is very important to us. We participate in this report, especially when we represent many countries. In the platforms, so we will get experience on how you are fighting this, this factor that leads to the impoverishment of the country. Don't hesitate to visit other localities except for this, because we have other interesting locations. Thank you for the opportunity to all parties. Now we will hear from the party I mentioned before, Mr. Sergey Blasenko, Member of Parliament. Yes, hello friends. First of all, thank you for the brilliant conference. And special thanks for Martin, who showed us an example of online party advertisement, when he named Oleg Sey as a member of Batkevshina. And thanks God he did it for free, so that is a good example of online advertisement of the political party. But I would like also to mention that in Ukraine, according to the law, the law regulates quite strictly the financing of the political parties, including online financing. And I would like to mention that today we have in the parliament a draft law just dealing with some aspects of the financing, and the finance will be more strictly regulated. And I see no problem here, and I would like to add that we have a quite good anti-corruption infrastructure, which controls the party financing. Yes, because of the war of aggression of Russian Federation, we terminated a little bit the declaration of the party assets, but I think the declaration will be restored at the beginning of autumn. And we will come back to the normal regulation of the party financing and transparency of the party financing. There were said a lot about the internet campaigning, but I would like, maybe I agree with mostly of what was being said, but I would like maybe to add some words about internet campaigning. The first thing when the party is dealing with the internet campaigning, I understand all that millions of followers and blah, blah, blah. But you see in such a country as Ukraine, for example, before the war, only 50% of the territory were covered by the internet. So the 50% of the territory were not covered by the internet, and every party should take that into account when you are planning your online campaigning. And I could say that today, because of the war, we have the ruins of the infrastructure, and sometimes the internet network is also ruined in some regions. For example, today we have a missile attack on Lviv, and I, as far as I know, several parts of the equipment which were supplying the internet on several regions of Lviv city were also broken. So we should take that into account. So the coverage of the internet is very important on that. That's why sometimes in Ukraine we start talking about the internet voting as the next step of internet campaigning. So I think that that's not on time right now, because as I mentioned, only half of the territory of Ukraine is covered by the internet. And also we have not a tradition, but we have an example of manipulation with the internet voting in the presidential elections of 2004 during the first and the second round. That's why we have the so-called third round of the presidential elections. Also we should say that one of the challenges, which was already mentioned, is that the social media giants are the private companies. And yes, they have the right to block some content, including the content of the political parties. Today it is a very sensitive issue in Ukraine, and my colleague Oleg Sigoncharenko mentioned his personal example. And I have even hundreds of examples when the real accounts in Facebook were blocked only because some people start mentioning that Crimea is Ukraine, the Donbass is Ukraine and so on and so on and so on. So we should take into account that the private companies could influence somehow, could influence the political content done by the political activists and party activists and the parties as political players. Also we should take into account the experience of the previous campaigns like Brexit and took all the lessons from that. Also we know several countries in which the Russian influence, online influence was fixed and we should also take a lesson on that. And we should find the technical possibilities to block the Russian influence on the local networks, on the local Facebook communities, local communities on other social networks. Also I agree with all that was mentioned in your program saying that there are a lot of so-called counter-propaganda issues which could be anonymous. And it gives you a possibility of no possibility for defamation because you couldn't find that. The previous colleague from Moldova mentioned that some people appear and disappear just one day after the campaigning but they use a very effective blackmailing and black campaign against the candidate or against the political party. And we should limit that both legally and both by the ethical principles of the big social giants. We should use both to block that or to minimize that somehow. By the way, talking about the financing and talking about the challenges for the political parties in Ukraine for the financing, I could mention several of them. For example, the Ukrainian political parties are prohibited to make payments abroad. If I will need from the political party to pay to Google, to YouTube, to Facebook directly, I will have no possibility to do it 100% legally. I should find some technical possibilities so the party member will do that and the party will pay for the party member. Yes, that will be legal but I should create some schemas to avoid that prohibition which is sometimes not reasonable. So I think that in Ukraine we should change the law and I think we will present the draft law which will regulate that. Also in Ukraine there is one specificity we have, I don't know how many parties are in Moldova, but I could say that in Ukraine in the register there are more than 300 political parties. All Ukrainian political parties who could compete, who could use all the privileges of the online campaigning and all the possibilities to make dirty campaigns against somebody. So that is also, as to me, that is a challenge because you see all these small or even very small political parties, they have no reputation, they have no voters. They exist only for one thing, for campaigning against someone. And that's the homework for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice to deal with all that list and to take off all that political parties which are really dead and they are only alive during some campaigns. And they are only used as the donors of the bad information and so on and so on and so on. Can I ask you to round off? Yes, you can do that, taking into account that you already made an advertisement for my party and thank you very much for that and I'm finishing. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. You're a very engaging speaker. Thank you very much. Now we have one more on our list and I will wrap up and have coffee and enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Next speaker is also from Ukraine, Mr. Ihor Odsul, who is the first Deputy Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Udaar political party. Very welcome. Yes, participant, I will use Ukrainian. Now I find myself in the situation of being a guest which has been waiting. I have been waiting for a long time to speak, like comparing that to Moldova waiting, waiting for a long time to raise a toast, a festive toast. I would like to pay your attention to several points. Number one is the problem that we are faced in Ukraine with being faced in Ukraine with is the lack of registration of metacompany as legal entity. It means that there is no possibility to pay direct for political aid and especially it is important when we have to pay for election campaign promotion of aid. As a result of this, political parties have to use different tricks and methods which result in driving the overall force of political aid and it may result in abusing some legal entities because somebody can order political advertising against another. I would like to introduce some editor in the section and using substitute or dummy companies, legal entities, the political party who is behind that may avoid responsibility. The second point that this company gets registered across all countries where they want to work in this way the process of political advertising will be much streamlined and efficient. The second point is the problem linked to distribution of political content online. This problem affects Ukraine and the previous speakers have also mentioned this problem. Currently it is very difficult to imagine any political content in Ukraine without mentioning references to the Russian war of aggression. Clearly one might assume that every political party is likely to use that in their narratives. Here the policy of Metacomany is limited to that the statements or phrases like Russian specialists are like no humans, Russian no humans are interpreted as a speech and this results in blocking accounts of politicians and even political parties. That is absolutely wrong and this does not reflect the real status of things and it results in artificial distortion of a political discourse. In addition to it, the policy of Twitter company is such that any mention of the war in Ukraine is interpreted as misinformation and it results of lowering ranking of the messages of the post which is counterproductive and prevents political parties from conveying their messages across their audiences, their voters and there is a suspicion that some political forces that are involved into that are likely to be funded by foreign sources and they are likely to disseminate the messages that not everything is so clear, it's not necessarily Russia's fault, somebody else may be guilty in that and we have to take all that into account when planning and discussing policy making. Thank you for your attention. Rich menu of perspectives and very engaged speakers it's very clear that political parties are thinking a lot about the infringements of other actors but maybe not as much as their own compliance because it's taken as a given but also and I'm from a political party myself of course we think about how to use online not how to report how we use it I mean that's really a second step and that's kind of when you think about strategy you hope that you have some accountants who can kind of ensure the compliance for you so it's really difficult I think to engage with political parties to talk about this because you know it's not the main interest because the interest is actually being out there campaigning and meeting citizens. So there needs to be a building of capacity in parties that I think that they like the bodies oversight bodies actually have to engage a lot in this they can't expect compliance they have to be an active component of compliance and a helper in compliance as the national organizations of course we have dedicated resources for capacity building we have to be capacity building also in this area. One striking lesson I think is is that I think we started there and I think we get dimension to the broader the base of the party the less is the risk of capture so really let's build political parties that are brought with a lot of members who pay fees with a lot of small donors etc and then even if somebody comes with a bigger chunk of money it's not going to be as significant so I mean I tell all of you if you if it's not against the rules of your employer why don't you join a political party why don't you engage yourself in politics it's a participation sport and it's actually dependent on every citizen doing their part. The last point I take with me is that all the parties I think that we heard one equal opportunities for the different parties so actually then there is a basis for a good conversation between the parties you regulate it together and then you play the game just as in football or or any other sport. Thank you very much for your interventions now a quick coffee bring it to the table and then we'll continue with the conference thank you very much. So our interesting discussion is moving forward we have already discussed international standards and best practices in terms of online campaign finance we looked into country practices how different countries regulate the issues and what as what mandates they are assigning to the national authorities. We had the opportunity to listen to our political parties from the region how they actually use social media and what challenges they see and what improvement they are looking for. And it was referenced so much during today's discussion that the most important sometimes is even not the regulation itself but how it is actually implemented so this session will be mostly devoted to the methodologies of monitoring and oversight of online campaign finance. And here we need to start with that it's quite a new phenomenon so we couldn't say that we have a perfect methodology somewhere and all of us we are looking forward to hear what others are doing in order to monitor online campaign finance. I guess we are still all struggling to introduce perfect political finance or campaign finance methodology for monitoring and overseeing. And now we are challenged even more with trying to monitor and oversee online space with much more actors and with transnational nature of the companies that are placing these political ads. And today we will hear on Moldovan, Romanian, Ukrainian and Armenian experiences in order to compare them to hear what methodologies these countries use and what challenges they face and what solutions they actually found so far and what proposal they may have further on. And it's my pleasure to give the floor to our co-hosts to the Central Electoral Commission of Moldova to Mr. Pavel Pestika, who is deputy chairperson of the Central Electoral Commission of Moldova but just to give you a little bit of background for I guess more than 20 years Pavel will correct me on the number of years. Pavel was working for a prominent Moldovan election observation organization so Pavel has seen both sides from civil society and from state institutions so we hope to hear Pavel from you. How things are different and what you can recommend to state institutions but also to civil society organizations and in which capacity you felt more comfortable in terms of monitoring these issues and of course for overseeing how do you feel the things are in Moldovan. I think there are colleagues present in this room that I worked together and they can confirm that I was saying that my first piece of advice is very simple. We need to put in the first front the electoral, not to go and intentionally look for errors or for mistakes but rather when I came into this position at the Central Electoral Commission in addition to this piece of advice I may provide another advice that there's a need to be patient. We need to have patience because beyond the efforts and good will things move very slowly rather slowly not at the speed that you want irrespectively you need patience and if you are not patient you definitely won't manage to reach the targets and the objective sets. I am a presentation that has been reviewed several times including today during the session because many things have already been noted and I also wanted to avoid repetition or to duplicate but anyway an institutional idea that we need to highlight what has happened in the Central Electoral Commission of Moldova in terms of oversight and control of the political finance. The first reform took place in 2015, we have colleagues who contributed and worked at that time and I can say with pride that they are the parents of that very small reform. Then in 2015 the Central Electoral Commission became an authority that shall ensure the control and oversight of the political finance. And from then from that time the Central Electoral Commission made lots of efforts without having a dedicated team exclusively for that and without having legal duties fixed for this area they tried to face this challenge. And to address it their choice has been rather honest and they focused on oversight and on transparency trying to ensure transparency in the report financial statements. This has led to the fact that the financial statements were published in the public domain and could be accessed by the colleagues from the civil society organizations and they were brought to the attention of journalists who on the high develop parallel monitoring reports and who performed journalistic investigations and in this way contributed to reaching the objective, major objective, overall objective that the financial statements should become public, should be public. At the same time, they also created an expectation from the society on behalf of the side that the oversight and control body shall apply sanctions, and yes, the Central Electoral Commission used to apply sanctions in the meantime but usually they would be based on some complaints when somebody would file a complaint and the complaint would be argumented or have a rationale but that society was expecting that this oversight and control authority be proactive and this was impossible to do because they would not have duties prescribed by law and neither had they a dedicated team for that. In 2021 when we were appointed in position, the current composition of the CSE, we would be aware of this handicap but we said we will try to move forward and break the ice. So we took over a proactive role and we created the working group and beyond ensuring transparency of the financial statements, we started checking how correctly the Electoral Compactors reported and calculated expenses and this resulted in multiple sanctions applied by the CSE in within a short campaign in the partial elections in the localities, we applied multiple sanctions using the entire spectrum from simple advertisements or reprimands, depriving them from the state budget allocations up to tough sanctions like exclusion from the campaign of competitors. In this way we tried to convey a message to both their society and the political class that the oversight and control body, the CSE will try to fulfill the duties proceeding from the possibilities that are in place. But in parallel, we insisted on modernizing the legislation in this way, we came up with a draft amendments on Electoral Code and connects or related regulations by which we've tried to solve this handicap related to the duties of the CSE. At the same time, we included in our staff this dedicated team, a specialized division for oversight and control. It's only eight staff member team, but currently we have only five fielding positions, but we're trying to move things forward. There is one more aspect that we managed to consolidate which is the evidence that we use. And in my opinion, this is very important because in our decisions on applying sanctions we use open data inclusively, those collected from the social media from publications on the internet, we use alternative reports provided by independent observers and all these were used in our arguments when we applied sanctions. And the positive part is that the court institutions accepted them as evidence in trials. And in my personal opinion, this is a good thing, the positive thing. And I said that we have a rather short experience but which allowed us to come or draw certain conclusions. And the main one is that we have a lot of work to do further on, but beyond this, we are aware of the fact that the things are in constant evolution or developing, practices change, even the social media networks change. We have now a new law on political advertising. I don't know how it is going to work and which facts it will produce, but it is a certain fact that at the national level, we have the legal obligation that any political advertising be marked, be it during the campaigns or outside the campaigns. So it should be possible to identify the accounts, the paying account, the who pays for such advertising, and obviously the sources, or the source from where the payment was made. So therefore the control and oversight, Buddhists should perform or ensure traceability to be able to follow the money. And I'd like to reiterate that we've forwarded to the parliament and the parliament approved a new electoral code and amendments to the law and political parties. We created this special unit with eight staff members and the most important thing which was mentioned also by the Madam President, we are trying to strengthen our oversight and control capacities including at level two of local authorities. So we have no illusion that these persons will be from the very first movement vigilant and will fulfill their duties by 100%. But we undertake to teach them so they can help us in this process. And in addition to this staff, eight staff units will have another 32 permanent positions at the level of each try on each district that should be our ears and eyes in the territories and also they will note everything that's happening in territories. So a few words about the key challenges that we are facing. But again, and another important accomplishment that I apologize for getting back to this is that we've really exchange, we will set an exchange of data with central lion authorities like with this main state talk office, the National Office for Insurance, banking institutions, this thing works better, the coordination works better than it used to in the past. And now I'm getting to the challenges. The role of juror or arbitrator does not only is in showing who plays how but it's a role that would show the red card whenever somebody impringes the tough rules and we need to take over and we've taken it and we are going to use this role as provided for by law. So the improvement of third parties using or ensuring major visibility in the electoral campaigns, particularly those online. And this has been viewed well positively and was highlighted in the last election in Georgia and and in the consequences when third parties go actively involved in the electoral campaign in Moldova and the compact one for which the outside the financiers involved the one day elections. Well, many people mentioned that Moldova is a small country but at the same time, to be more exact in figures over the past campaign, 55,000 competitors were engaged. And now, with eight staff unit in this oversight and control unit and set it to chair persons of distinctions will definitely not be sufficient and we need to convey this mission to this message to the society. So, and if they do not file complaints, we won't manage to document all the cases or infringements, and the society should not have high expectations from us, because we won't we effectively won't manage to do everything without them. And digitalization is evolving every day, we put in place in a platform, and it gets obsolete because much better ones image, and as a state server side and control body based on the resources from the state budget we are in an equal competition with the electoral competitors and political parties will have much more money, we need to ensure and another challenges to ensure guarantee against abuse. Personal data protection commercial set trade secret, when it is the case, and the last three aspects or challenges. Data exchange with international companies I'm talking about met Google et cetera, because I was saying that there is no certain at least some kind of quality and collaboration in terms of reporting period you may see how much was spent three months ago but you know you can't see exactly how much was spent in the first half of 2022 in the second half and this is done only for request, or can be achieved before request and last but not least the largest challenge that I see is victimization that electoral parties apply when they are sanctioned, they do it purposefully they infringe purposefully hoping, maybe to be sanctioned and victimize get victimize. And in this way they spend money to promote this idea that they are victimized and illegally sanctioned. This is it, I apologize for taking more time than playing. Right that we need to run faster than things are developing once we are settling with something, it's already changed and not actual so we need to find another solution while we still are trying to accommodate what we just have invented. So it's an interesting area and I'm glad to continue this discussion and to look at Romanian experience and we have actually a very interesting speaker chairperson of the permanent electoral authority of Romania, former constitutional court judge and former senator and prefect of Bucharest and former secretary general of the government, Mr Tony Grebla and I guess Mr Grebla it will be extremely interesting to hear also from you from your current capacity as the chairperson of the permanent electoral authority of Romania, but also from your previous experience as a politician, different sites of how you've seen these issues before and how do you feel in your new capacity as a chairperson in terms of how to monitor and to oversee online campaign finance. The floor is yours, thank you. Thank you very much. First of all, once again I want to congratulate everyone for the organization of this event and thank you very much for presenting my professional background. I would like to share with you a few of the progress that my country made in the process of diminishing the risks of different types of frauds for the online election campaigning. So in Romania, we are proud of the fact that we were one of the first countries that started to regulate actually in details the online election campaigns, the promotion of the election campaigns. And we speak mainly about the initial regulation that was obviously made for the broadcasting TV and radio and in general what we identified as a big challenge in following the path of the money used in these campaigns online was the fact that the financing of this activity is very difficult to be followed mainly because of the big number of election competitors, at least in our country. In the local election, where we have a lot of candidates, usually it's a big challenge. For example, in the year 2000, we had more than 2,000 competitors. Imagine how difficult, even impossible, is to verify every single one of them and how they were financed and how they spend their money, mainly in the online campaigns. Through the modalities that we have identified at the level of the authority that I was representing, the authority responsible for diminishing the risks in the online election campaigns, we first of all decided to define the activity because it's a very complex one. And first of all, we have to understand what it is propaganda material. We were concerned to identify the legal modernity to dismiss the material, to remove the illegal online materials that are in the background of this kind of election activity. Also, verification of financing sources, funding sources and enforcing dissuasive sanctions. So as a definition for the propaganda material, we thought that it should refer directly to a candidate to a political party, clearly identified. And within the election campaign, to address to a larger public, also to overcome the journalistic traditional challenge, to use also other channels. And to see to what extent the equity and fairness is respected. In that sense, of course, we focused on the removal of illegal online materials, but of course we have to be very careful on doing that. Because we are speaking about an honest election campaign and from one hand and from another hand, we can go to another extreme where we start to limit the freedom of expression of the citizens. In my country, the financing of the political party by third parties is forbidden. Yes, there are donations that can be done, amounts a little bit bigger than in Moldova, but not financing of a campaign, per se. So what we managed to do is to regulate the proportion between the expenses for the online publicity advertisement and they could represent not more than 30% of the expenses of a candidate within a political campaign. Nevertheless, in practice we saw that the election competitors develop activities illegally and this happens during the election campaign and they are using this mainly in the pre-campaign phase. And in this phase, it's quite difficult to find a balance between the desire of all the competitors to make as much as possible publicity, so advertisement, and those limitations that they have from the perspective of the time frame that is allowed for that. By the end of the day, the authority that I'm leading made the decision about the declared contributions for the competitors and we are speaking here about the income declaration. And all that information is uploaded on a web page and can be checked by all the interested parties, including mass media. So financial resources and election expenses are controlled also by the same authority, same institution. Competitors are bringing justification documents for all the expenses that they have within an election campaign. So they are making a report, they are making a declaration, a self declaration about how they use the materials in the online environment and also they report on the propaganda material that they use. We have all the registration about the online development of the election campaigns and they are verified and they are also cross verified in order to make sure that there are no hidden expenses and hidden actions within the election promotion of the election. Candidates. We have also introduced a large list of, an extensive list of penalties. The penalty goes from 2 up to 10,000 euro and the amount that are spent illegally can be confiscated. And the political parties can lose their benefit of subsidies and the candidates cannot validate their mandates if they do not make a proper report confirming the expenses that they had during the election campaign. And also the authority that I represent has the right to refuse the coverage of some of the expenses of the candidate granted by them if they do not make a proper report on those expenses. I want also to make a conclusion that when it comes to proper regulation, regulatory framework, we have to take into consideration the technological advancements, technological developments. This is crucial in order to protect the interests of the stakeholders in the election process. We are going to continue to improve our relationship with different public authorities involved in the election process and civil society and the election competitors. Mainly because Romania from July 2024 is going to have four elections, election of the members of the parliament in the European parliament, elections for the local public administration, presidential election, parliamentary election at the national level. Everything will happen in six months and it's going to be a big challenge for the authority I'm representing, but also for other authorities that are involved in a way or another in the organization and development of the election process. Before closing my speech, I would like to congratulate Madam President of the CEC from Moldova, Central Election Committee, for all the efforts that they managed to undertake together with international and national partners. And I want to congratulate those that have organized this event because it's a very welcomed one and it's a great platform to change good experiences and good practices. Thank you very much. Mr. Grabla, indeed it was very interesting experience. I would say you have such a well-developed methodology overall as an approach just to look through different stages in terms of how do you collect data, how you actually verify data, how you then ensure, apply sanctions and actually validation of mandates and not submitting reports as a reason for not validating mandates and as a requirement for validation of mandates is quite important. And of course enhancing relations with stakeholders and cooperation is important because no one these days could ensure transparency of campaign finance or online campaign finance without great collaboration with other state and non-state actors. And now I want to give the floor to two speakers from my own country from Ukraine. We are moving slowly this year. In Ukraine there is a special agency, national agency for prevention of corruption that is responsible for political finance oversight starting from 2015. And today we have two speakers from national agency. We have first of all Igor Hohic, head of the apparatus of the national agency for corruption prevention. But I also want to reference Igor's previous experience as a member of the Council of National Public TV Broadcaster, which should be interesting in regard to the topic of our discussion. And we also have Mr. Alexander Balas, who is the head of the external communication unit of the department for the prevention of political corruption and in his previous capacity, the director of the state enterprise information court system. So both are having interesting complementary previous experience on the topic. I guess Igor, you will start. Please, the floor is yours. I would like to introduce you with the steps taken by NACP to ensure campaign finance oversight in Ukraine. What I have heard at the conference today, I realized that some of the challenges that we have are in common. NACP performs oversight over the activities of political parties and their candidates in terms of political finance and we perform this oversight through monitoring current operations of political parties, verifying if they are compliant with the Articles of Association of the political party and we monitor participation of candidates in elections during the election campaign season and their involvement with the financing political advertising on behalf of the political parties. We have noticed that the reports submitted by political parties and the political actors do not necessarily reflect accurate and full information on online campaigning, which may be a sign of some hidden expenses and hidden information on online campaigning. The lack of information on clients, companies or individuals who paid for the advertising. Today it was mentioned by some other panelists. Another issue is the emergence of new platforms, new web portals that are created to be used as a platform to place political ads and later on they disappear. What has been done in Ukraine to that end? The law on media has been adopted to regulate online ads and different web platforms. If legal entity behaves as a media outlet, sooner or later this media outlet will come into focus on the regulating authority, regardless of the fact that this organization may have been registered as non-media. Online campaigning and analysis of an ACP that monitor online campaigning as well as the public may clearly see spending on online campaigning through our efforts. Next point I would like to mention, opening bank accounts by political parties will be included into the PolitData system. There is a module that contains the data on exchange of information between the banks. The question about lack of labeling of political ads. Some of the speakers have mentioned that issue earlier today. We have this problem in Ukraine too. Not all political ads are clearly marked. Taking into account that our capacity and our human resources are somewhat limited at an ACP, we suggest we plan to rely on civil society groups that can be involved in monitoring online campaigning. How to perform monitoring of events organized by political parties and candidates in order to understand the level of expenses the political party or candidate is likely to incur and then compare them with the figures in financial reports. That is another issue. My colleague will speak about political advertising online, but to sum up the challenges that we still have ahead of us. We have to regulate online campaigning in the media environment. We expect that members of parliament will submit the draft law on regulating online campaigning. I think we need to implement the procedures of interaction and cooperation with social media platforms and their owners. To ensure the public has unimpeded access to ad-library and the like tools, it is necessary to implement European standards in the Ukrainian legislation considering the need to prevent the malicious influence of some political forces and entities over the political process, political life in Ukraine. Micro-targeting techniques can be used when implementing the European legislation in Ukraine and if it creates more approximation to the EU. We need to make sure opinion polling surveys are not abused by some of the candidates of political forces in the election as it has been happening. Now I would like to give a floor to my colleague who will talk about other accomplishments we have achieved. Thank you, dear host of this conference. This is very important. What I have noticed, the key principle that we have in the acts that have already been adopted at the EU level such as act on digital services or digital markets, all the restrictions that we have offline, they should be transferred online. That is the principle that we adhere to when monitoring political finance during the election campaign period in 2020, local elections and in the interim period. That is political party activities that are taking place between the electoral events election campaign time periods. Due to the martial law introduced in Ukraine, we cannot hold elections. The constitution of Ukraine prohibits holding elections during the martial law. We can make some conclusions from our observations. When we speak about political party current activity, according to our experience, we use ad library, Facebook ad library as the main tool. We didn't have any other tools available back several years ago. If we refer to the presidential election of 2019, at that time we didn't have ad library and we could not analyze how the online campaigning was done during the presidential election campaign. So we have three years with the scope of our study, 2020, 2021 and early 2022. We have ad library since recently in 2021. Political parties were placing promotion messages on a regular basis and we have noticed that one political party has placed promotional messages. The cost of it was equivalent to $100. However, we did not receive the records on such spending in the political party finance reports. We requested the party to provide explanation and the political party responded by providing several letters. This reporting environment is valid for each quarter of the year. Political party responded that political party has incurred no expenses on placing promotional message because political party as a legal entity has no relation to the account holder on Facebook. And the party insinuated that that message, that post may have been paid for by the political party supporters. I would like to remind you that according to the law of Ukraine, we do not allow making donations in favor of a political party by anonymous individuals. As we were unable to identify individuals who stood behind such nations and the political party had no preventive policy to prevent such actions from happening either. The National Agency has put together a lawsuit and submitted it to the law enforcement authorities and the criminal investigation is ongoing regarding this legal offense. Another situation is linked there to ad library Facebook. I would like to mention that civil society has been helping us immensely. Chesna or poorer civil movement. According to the research conducted by Chesna with ad library, they identified that in the first quarter of 2021, the political party has received ads sponsored posts on Facebook, the amount of which constituted $2,000. And of course, when we requested the political party to clarify this situation, they did confirm the contribution by civil society organization, and they did confirm that the political party received this contribution in the form of payment for social media ads. According to the law, political parties are banned from receiving such contributions in coin. There is a mandatory for political party supporters to transfer funds to the political party electoral bank account and the bank account shall be used as a source of payment for such expenditures. So our agency has drawn up a report on legal offense in the field of providing donor contribution to the electoral fund of a political party and that the responsible person has been penalized by charging fine. When we analyzed the ad library on Facebook, we realized that the political party financial reports that were submitted before the COVID pandemic, we have noticed a very positive trend. One of these speakers has already mentioned that in Ukraine, we have over 300 political parties officially registered and half of them about 150 political parties are reporting on a regular basis. And since the ad library has been introduced and our requirements, political parties started demonstrating they became more aware of their behavior in terms of online campaigning. Some of them continued their negative practices, I have already mentioned, but quite many parties started reflecting in their reports, expenditures, or placing promotional video messages or videos online. In my opinion, EU acts are depended by the principle that all restrictions and all provisions in place that are applicable to the offline activities should be transferred to the online activities. We have had many discussions and negotiations with both government entities and the civic society groups and all stakeholders regarding this. Thank you for your time. Once, for example, met our Facebook is opening data regarding certain countries and political parties at least know that they will be seen and they will be followed, it is stimulating them actually to report more accurately at least about official spending on online campaigning. And now I'm glad to give the floor to the secretary of the Central Electoral Commission of Armenia to Mr. Armand Sambatyan. Armand is the secretary of the CEC for the last 12 years from 2011. So he is one of the most experienced among us in terms of electoral management and it's extremely interesting to hear your opinion regarding how things are in Armenia and what are you doing with monitoring and overseeing online campaign finance. Thank you, you legend. First of all, I would like to say thank you for organizing for this very urgent conference, but let me return on my mother language and not break the tradition of this session. Thank you very much to everybody who was speaking today and for sharing their experience. Today I was convinced once again that the issues are common and the solutions are different because in this panel, some issues were presented, I will start by presenting the experience of my country. The evolution of campaign finance oversight can be divided into two phases in Armenia. It was done previously by a specific subdivision of our ministry, of our committee and it was an everyday work. There was a supervision about for the everyday financial activity and the CEC was exercising oversight only during the electoral campaigns and the expenses by the political parties in 2011. All the functions were transferred to the CEC and all the financial information about campaigns was controlled by the CEC or by a body which was functioning under the CEC, which was the oversight committee of the CEC. The new constitution entered into force and an anti-corruption committee was created and for just cause some discussions started about the fact that whether or not the yearly financial oversight should be remained within the mandate of the CEC. Or whether or not it was more expedient to transfer these functions to the anti-corruption committee which was actually done as from 2022. So the powers of this oversight were transferred to the anti-corruption committee and just one small component remained under the mandate of the CEC which is the control of the campaign which we continue but on the other side. We are now discussing whether or not it is possible to take it out from the powers of the CEC because the constitution provides for the power of exercising oversight over the political campaigns to the CEC. Now we're discussing a draft law and if it is adopted, if it passes and this component, the oversight over expenditures spent exclusively during the electoral campaigns will remain under the mandate of the CEC. So and the oversight committee will keep exercising this type of oversight. Let me now remember, come back to our today's most important topics that were discussed. If we try to discuss separately all these issues, the campaign offline and online, it is already quite complicated matters topics already being separated, not very easy to oversee those functions. And if combined, they become an equation with two unknown items. So there is a debate now that which one is more dangerous. Drunken driver on the and the answer is the drunken driver riding a bicycle is more dangerous. So when we are talking about overseeing separately online campaigning and offline campaigning or overseeing campaigning at as a whole. And if we consider the difficulty levels and we combine those, we find that this is just compared comparable to the drunken driver of a bicycle. If we consider the experience of the last years and the evolutions of the last years, Julia mentioned already that I have held this position for 12 years. If I go back 10 years, this topic was not existent at all, even though it is natural that all the expenditures for a political campaign should be considered. And in 2022 in Armenia, we adopted a law. And it is indicated in that law that online campaigning should also be reflected in your reports financial reports and despite the fact that I consider that together we react to these issues very adequately. However, unfortunately, we have entered into a very dark forest and the forest is growing faster than we can get acquainted with this forest. And it is important that we are acting and we're identifying issues based on problems already occurred previously. We find solutions for such problems, we find opportunities, but nevertheless we're unable to guess which kind of issues we'll have tomorrow in the future because online possibilities online are growing by the day and based on our own experience, we can deal the matter that 10 years ago. In such a conference, very few people could make posts online or could publish information on online platforms. And on the contrary, today there are very few people who do not do it and even considering the accountability, the life cycle. And of course, the elections as well because we are in a digital age may use the possibilities offered by the digital world and we cannot limit those but as it was said several times so we have to try to see ahead. And I wouldn't like to speak too much because the information that we received today is already quite a lot. I just would like to call on the participants or the organizers to organize such discussions more frequently so that we were able to share issues that we face in our everyday lives during the organization of electoral processes. And that we're able to share information about the solutions, possible solutions to such issues. IFAS already created a platform on this matter and it's very, it's a welcome but it's not enough. I would like to have more workshops, not conferences but workshops and to multiply our efforts because this is the problem of the future. This is the problem of the future because the amounts and the online opportunities are by far creating much outcry reaction in the society and they might create a larger outcry, larger effect in the reality than the reality itself. So you can obtain more influence by money and by using the online possibilities. Of course, meta representative today presented what was done in the last years in order to improve transparency and oversight. However, social media platforms are not the only resource online resource for online propaganda. Political parties have long standing measures means resources for online online media outlets, etc, which are completely outside of our control. And I should tell that internet enables us today to enable people to perform some activity outside of any legal framework from foreign countries over which a given country doesn't have any authority at all. And this is one of the questions, one of the matters which should be concerning us in the future. As a conclusion, I would like to thank the CEC of Moldova for hosting us, for receiving us today here and encourage to organize such events in all the countries. Because as I see, the Moldovan and Romanian involvement inclusion is quite impressive. We have had access to quite a big, large volume of research, which we will take and use in our experience. And in this respect, exchange of such information and discussion, mutual discussion of issues could ease our lives a lot. Thank you very much. And indeed, we need to have more precise and more technical discussion within the political finance, oversight agencies, on the methodologies within the political parties and quite sectoral discussions. So we need, I guess, collectively with Odir, with NDI-IPAS to think how to combine efforts and how to organize these sectoral discussions in terms of deepening our knowledge on the peculiarities of the issue. And at last, but not least, I am pleased to invite Mr. Petru Jarmaluuk, prosecutor delegated to anti-corruption prosecutor's office of Moldova. Interestingly enough, at the beginning of his career, Mr. Jarmaluuk was part of the liberal reform party. So he knows from inside how things are done and organized within the political parties, but also he was an internal auditor for the Agency for Intervention and Payments for Agriculture. And since 2017, Mr. Jarmaluuk is in different capacity with anti-corruption prosecutor's office. And he was also leading a number of quite sound investigations in Moldova on top political corruption. So we are extremely interested to hear Petru from you in terms of particular cases of investigation of political corruption by political parties and state officials of high level state officials. The floor is yours. Good afternoon. So you have the sound. It is a special honor and pleasure to share some thoughts and intentions and also my experience. In fact, the anti-corruption prosecutor's office does not monitor oversight, the money or the finance of electoral campaigns. The anti-corruption prosecutor's office prosecutes investigations, some cases of illegal financial political parties of electoral campaigns. A very important aspect is that that anti-corruption prosecutor's office upon notice of authorities responsible for the oversight and the finance of parties to initiate criminal investigations. A very, very negative or aspect that is in this advice of the integrity of the electoral process is that is in the very limited term of the electoral process in the pre-campaign, which is maximum 60 days, which does not allow the possibility to the criminal investigation authority or body to use conclusive and sufficient evidence and forward criminal accusation and obtain a sentence, a finally evocable sentence. For instance, it would be good to be taken by the court of appeal of Kishinau because another authority would be involved in another in Kahul. No matter how much we want and how much we indicate there are reasonable suspicions that certain illegalities have been committed in the electoral campaign with regard to the use of money that is undeclared or are prohibited from abroad or acceptance from organized crime groups or by other sites. So we won't be able to intervene, so this can be done only by the central authority at the level of electoral constituency or by the CEC, the Central Electoral Commission, to intervene with the notification and a request on application of the sanction and handling the registration of the competitor. So, in terms of interruption, our workers would be good for all the authorities involved in the oversight, such as the service for prevention and combating over money laundering or do visual counsel for lease inspectory. Prosecutors office, Central Electoral Commission, to join efforts and based on the constitutional loyalty principle to demonstrate efficiency in the way the law is applied. Just because the process of creating or establishing state or bodies is determined by the integrity and quality of electoral campaign finance, if money is used from prohibited sources or from undeclared sources, the quality of these bodies that are going to be established as a result of elections will be likewise or like all the way that the electoral campaign took place. Of course, money in politics is not something prohibited, it is not prohibited, it is important to what matters is the source of origin, so money should not come from organized crime groups or third states. So, Eastern European countries have a very unhappy experience in this regard and a lot of money comes from outside the states that want to perform geopolitical control in this area and institutions empowered by law enforcement authorities should act promptly and efficiently. Otherwise, when the Republic of Moldova has very good laws in place and regulations on the procedure for reporting the use of money to allow inter coming with measures of not allowing that by using illegal money not to allow to have candidates or persons appointed in public positions that need to provide public services to manage public finance or funds and ensure development of the state and should ensure efficiency and democracy and human rights and freedoms. So the last decision of the constitutional court on which we got to the transparency and compliance in the use of money and activity of parties and electoral campaigns, so was raised to the constitutional rate, which in line with the principle of constitutional constitutional right to make the or implies or empowers authorities otherwise we will fail a lot if we fail. So, from my own experience, I prosecute certain cases of illegal financing of political parties and electoral campaigns, so not far away in 2017-2020, when there are reasonable suspicion based on evidence and when funds were used from prohibited and undeclared sources and through offshore companies. This is sufficiently difficult to demonstrate but not impossible. Why? Because we focus on administrating the evidence through a regulatory commission, which takes a lot of time and we have the experience in which a person also subsequently the guilt of is demonstrated, the mandate is already exercised and the person might be in another public dignity function. So if the person is declared or is acknowledged as guilty, then in addition to the key sanction, be it a fine or deprivation of the right to hold the public dignity functions, this sanction will intervene of non admission of this person to participate and participate in elections and in taking public dignity functions. And when the colleagues from the central electoral commission as a result of monitoring the election campaign, we must inform them through a report that contains evidence and only then the prosecutor will intervene in order to investigate what the electoral rival is, what the party is. The security committee and from the general police inspectorate and from the service for prevention and money laundering. One of the priorities and key concerns for the next three years is to ensure the integrity of the electoral processes in protecting the fundamental rights and freedoms to defend the democracy and independence and sovereignty of the Republic of Moldova because all the politics on the people's will and the people's will should be materialized through electoral correct electoral processes and exercises that are integral without money from criminal organizations, from money generating from third parties in order to ensure a European integration that would be coherent consequence of good quality that would put into the aspirations and the work that we are doing for this purpose. So I wish you and I stay to in Moldova and wish you good results in this conference and we hope that this activity and this conference for me personally for instance is very important as it provides new information which will be used in the prosecution or investigations that I carry out and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak before you and may you have and I stay in the Republic of Moldova. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We still can take a couple of questions from the audience. So if there is any question please raise your hand. Someone will help us with the microphones. Please raise your hand. Good evening everyone. I have double feelings today. Maybe because first of all I am honored and I am pleased to participate at this event. Honor because it's a pleasure to me to be part of this actual discussion, important discussion and not only for authorities who are dealing with oversize of political financing but of course with another stakeholder in this process and pleasure because I have this opportunity to meet my old friends from different authorities and electoral experts and of course to see new faces feeling or involving in this field. I will continue in Romanian because previous speakers from my country spoke in Romanian so I don't violate this unwritten rule. My question for this panel is the following. What would be the key elements for a better applicability of the law in terms of oversize of political finance? Because in two phase what to do good enforcement would mean to have a well established mandate to have administrative resources in place funds and why I am saying financial resources because in our case when the central electoral commission with competence to oversight the political finance has a lower budget than the budget of some parties that are receive allocations from the state budget. It seems unfair to me and this influences the capacity of the monitoring and control capacity and in terms of the accountability and sanctions applied. From your point of view what are the most important elements that could contribute to a better applicability of the law? Thank you and a wishing success to everybody. I see Pavel wants to respond. Please Pavel. I will try to respond because partially I have already provided an answer in my presentation. In addition to good faith and patience I think we need to be insistent as well as control oversight bodies because technically speaking financial resources perfect laws will never be existing. So it is very little likely that we will have like perfect laws on the sufficient budgets and at least these three elements are key and if we have them we will manage in my opinion will manage to face the challenges because from all the speeches or presentations not only in this panel but throughout the entire day any sanction attracts some or entails prevention. Once we notify a political compact that this draws the attention of other political parties are the candidates and then they are more attentive in observing the rules of the game and of course we will not manage to sanction all of them. But at least if we want to if we prove that we are determined and to apply sanctions in this way we will convey a message to all the political actors and they will be more careful and attentive and will minimize or diminish the number of infringements. This is my opinion. I have my own solution. I believe the best solution could be the maximum possible digitalization of all of the processes because the digitalization of the processes of all of the control and oversight is the basis the foundation for anti-corruption because you cannot bribe the computer and the computer can cover a big number of processes that a person can use. You cannot cover even the entire agency cannot cover in Ukraine. In fact, we are trying to have this attitude and to build this kind of system that could have the interoperability and exchange of information and data with other agencies with the banking registers and databases that could be related to the fund-dancing of the political parties. This is the process data to zero. This is an ambitious project. Thank you to IFAS for supporting us. I believe the digitalization of reporting procedures could be a solution and the answer to your question. Yes, Mr. Grapav. In my opinion, there are essential things that may contribute to what our colleague raised as a question. The credibility of the authority that is in charge of oversight to carry out control over this. If the authority creates an aura in a way that through the non-discriminatory measures applied against all of them, all the electoral competitors that infringe the law, then on the one hand, the authority will be legitimated before the citizens. And also on the fear not to make mistakes on behalf of the competitors will increase. Secondly, there should exist a certain continuity in the activity of controlling the way the political parties or the electoral campaigns are financed. We've noticed over the years, over the experience of Romania that a sanction that has been applied in an electoral campaign on a certain type of infringement of the law on financing electoral campaign achieved very good results. And we could see the results in the next, in the following campaign when the majority of competitors no longer wished to make the same mistake or to commit the same infringement, knowing well that there is a high chance to be discovered and the sanction to be applied. And from this point of view, continuity in the activity of oversight over the electoral campaign is essential. It is essential also to situate how the control of oversight institutions operate, the court of account, the electoral authority, other agencies, state agencies that check the way the campaigns are financed and the way the electoral campaigns take place. Through organizing meetings, exchange of experience between these institutions in order to follow a single methodology in exercising the oversight or the control. So on these things in my opinion, in addition to many others, because ensure that an electoral campaign be unfolded with as little infringement as possible of the law on the finance of electoral campaigns. Thank you. Thank you very much. I would like to add a factor. First of all, a person should leverage the degree of limitations restrictions in order to exercise oversight, because sometimes too much limitations will cause harm to the process. Because electoral processes are very fast and sometimes you do not have enough time to apply some administrative measures. Second factor is that political actors, the political, the electoral body authority, corporates closely with electoral stakeholders and provides them instructions because sometimes the infringements and the violations occur because of lack of knowledge. And it is also important to ensure a uniform approach in the processes when we work with electoral stakeholders. And as it was pointed out a few times, there should be a cooperation between all the electoral bodies. They should exercise the oversight having access to the information that the state holds. For example, the oversight body receives the necessary information from other state bodies, state institutions, and it has the possibility to even deal with bank secrets. And the CEC during the electoral campaign period, the CEC, if Armenia receives every three days information from the central bank about the financial resources of the political parties. So I would like to mention the following aspect. Not only the central election commission must be involved in this monitoring and oversight process. Our colleagues from the security services must also be part of the process and inform us about the potential risks. Because it's not always about offshore companies, issues, or money laundry. And the usage of the crypto currency is something that should bring to the table of discussion also the agency responsible for money laundry. And using this currency in online services is always a challenge. And I believe tomorrow we will discuss this, but I think the central election committee doesn't matter how prepared, how well prepared it is and how many employees are dealing with monitoring. Alone this institution will not manage. It is very important for all of us to come on board and for each of us to contribute to the process till the end. And let's not forget that each election campaign or political party, if they go against the law, they should face a trial by the end of the day. So much it was such an interesting discussion and it's such a deep regret that I need to roll it up. Because within such a passionate and professional audience, it's such a great pleasure to discuss issues that may be not so much interested for the general public, but I guess within the colleagues, it's such an interesting discussion. And today, during our session, we've heard that political finance oversight agencies, whether this is central electoral commission specialized anti-corruption agency or prosecutors office are facing various challenges starting from legal and administrative challenges, but also financial, organizational, human and other challenges. But we also have heard some of the good practices from each country. And I guess that we need to study more on this and to look on the elements that are successful in each particular model in order to combine all the efforts and in order to understand why some countries are successful and why something works better in some contexts and what we can bring and what could be applicable. In certain countries, because we also couldn't just duplicate, for example, Romanian experience to Ukraine, it's completely different society and completely different political culture, so we need to take this into account, but also social media platforms sometimes are also different. When we were studying, for example, Moldovan experience, Adnoklasniki and Kontakte are still quite popular here, so it's not so much relevant for Romania or for Ukraine, but for Moldova, it's another platforms where we need to take closer look in terms of how money is spent. I want to thank all of you for this great discussion. I want to thank our honorable speakers for their contribution, but I also want to thank our translators who were supporting us the whole day. Believe me, for them it was very intense but also quite complicated, since we were translating into English everything and then from English they were interpreting to Ukrainian, to Armenian and Romanian, Armenian and Ukrainian. Thank you so much, our interpreters. I know that you hear us. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your efforts to make this happen and to help us to understand each other. I wish you a pleasant stay in Moldova and a very good evening. We will see each other tomorrow. We will have two sessions. We will consider how civil society...