The New Edition of Law of the Republic of Lithuania on Funding of Political Parties and Political Campaigns, and Control of Funding – Political Impulse or Necessity?

Abstract

The article – assessing from the prospects of Lithuanian legal system – analyses the recommendations for Lithuania formulatedin the Evaluation Report of GRECO in the field of transparency of funding ofpolitical parties, their validity and adequacy to the factual situation. The attention is paid towards both the level of implementation of before mentioned recommendations, which is reflected in Compliance Report of GRECO, and the factual extent of their implementation.

The leading idea of this article is evaluation of the necessity to amend the Law on Funding of Political Parties and Political Campaigns. The questions risen in it are answered gradually, separately dealing with each in the Evaluation report of GRECO stated recommendation. So in this way a bit extraordinary structure of the article was determined.

Two main conclusions are drawn in the end of the article. Despite of the findings presented in the Compliance Report of GRECO that only three recommendations of all embodied in the Evaluation Report of GRECO were implemented partialy, factually Lithuania has implemented barely a half of them, moreover, namely those which needed least efforts to implement. As the analysis of the recommendations formulated in the Evaluation Report of GRECO shows, there is a reasonable basis for challenging some of the recommendations inreference to their adequacy to contemporary legal and factual reality of Lithuania, as well as the necessity to implement them, because from the systematic scope of view it can result in regress instead of progress.