BS
In the third week of August, the “Pod lupom” Coalition for Free and Fair Elections reported Ujedinjena Srpska for premature campaigning.
A video was published on the Facebook profile of Dr. Nenad Stevandić about a gathering of, as stated, candidates and party members from Trebinje, Bileća, and Gacko. The address conveyed political messages and the electoral platform: “Being a candidate means investing yourself, and I can comfortably say members of your family, into a political story that sometimes knows how to carry serious burdens. It will be the same this way this time. I do not claim that everything will be easy and that we will achieve what we have jointly set out to do without any problems. But that is why I ask each of you in this joint struggle of ours to give everything you can of yourself and invest yourself in a part of the story called Ujedinjena Srpska,” the post states.
The “Pod lupom” Coalition considered that Article 7.1 of the Election Law of BiH was violated, i.e., that this constituted conducting an election campaign during the period of premature, legally prohibited election campaign, which defines that “in the period of premature election campaign, it is prohibited to conduct an election campaign in electronic, online, and print media and via social networks or any form of public campaign advertising.” Furthermore, the Election Law of BiH defined premature campaigning as “any form of campaign actions undertaken by political subjects in the period from the calling of elections to the period of the official start of the election campaign.”
The Central Election Commission determined that the political entity conducted a premature campaign on social networks, violating the Election Law of Bosnia and Herzegovina. CIK made a decision to impose a financial sanction on the political entity Ujedinjena Srpska in the amount of 4,000 KM and on candidate Nenad Stevandić in the amount of 3,500 KM.
