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SARAJEVO, March 3 (FENA) – Speaker of the Assembly of Transparency International of Bosnia and Herzegovina (TI BiH) Aleksandra Martinović said in Sarajevo today that improving the Law on Public Procurement, through the adoption of amendments, should include strengthening anti-corruption provisions.
TI BiH organized a conference on “Improving the Public Procurement System in Bosnia and Herzegovina” as part of USAID's support to citizens in the fight against corruption. Before the beginning of the conference, Martinović said that the immediate reason for its holding was the recent legislative activity, especially the adoption of the Draft Law on Amendments to the Law on Public Procurement by the Council of Ministers of BiH.
Martinović added that this is a proposal in the development of which civil society actively participated in cooperation with the working group formed by the Council of Ministers. The reports of the European Commission speak of the obligation of additional harmonization with the European legal framework, i.e. with the new public procurement directives, which significantly improve the transparency of the entire public procurement cycle, from planning to agreement implementation.
“Additional motives for amending the law were the elimination of certain technical errors that were shown in the application of the current regulation adopted in 2014, and the most important for TI BiH and the rest of civil society is to strengthen anti-corruption provisions,” Martinović emphasized.
Amendments to the Law on Public Procurement, in which they participated and which they will discuss in more detail today, as she added, represent a kind of transitional solution, given that the number of necessary interventions in the current regulation, to make all the necessary harmonization with the European directives and to solve all the problems in practice, goes far beyond what can be called amendments.
Martinović mentioned that the legal proposal does not look the same today as it did when it left the working group, adding that it is about removing several provisions from that proposal that address the issues of criminal offense models, and inspection supervision.
TI BiH announced that US Ambassador Eric Nelson, Special Representative of the EU Delegation to BiH Johann Sattler and Chairman of the Board of TI BiH Srdjan Blagovčanin will participate in the conference. Also, representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH Dušanka Majkić and Predrag Kožul, as well as representatives of the BiH Public Procurement Agency, the BiH Procurement Review Body, and the Directorate for European Integration will attend the panel.
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