20.07.09

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has mapped out the ethic code for the Russian bureaucracy - the general principles of government employees' occupational conduct.

Public officials have been told to openly contact mass media people, to ward off the attempts by political parties to influence them, and never to mention U.S. dollars or euros as they quote economic performance parameters. Upon the President' s decision, the new edition of "the general principles of public officials' conduct" includes an anticorruption measure that was previously blocked by the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

The code consists of 18 commandments - 50% more than the Soviet-era 'Moral Code of the Builder of Communism', which Medvedev compared the newly specified principles to.

Thursday, the President introduced changes in the decree establishing the general principles of occupation conduct of government officials and in the principles introduced by former President Vladimir Putin August 12, 2002.

Kommersant Daily recalls that Medvedev himself took part in drafting the original version of the decree, then in the capacity of a deputy chief of the Kremlin Administration.

The current changes arise from the adoption of the federal Law on Counteracting Corruption that was passed in December 2008. Its new edition specifies stronger restrictions and bans and sets forth additional duties for officials.

The amendments that Medvedev has introduced now suggest that officials must report all the attempts to bribe them to their superiors or to law enforcement agencies. Also, they are supposed to hand over to the state all the presents, the cost of which stands atop of 3,000 rubles.

When the presidential anticorruption package was discussed in the State Duma the previous time, the MPs decided to exempt a similar provision out of it, with MP Vladimir Pligin, the chairman of the committee for constitutional legislation saying it was an untimely one.

He said the law must envision voluntary reporting. MP Gennady Gudkov, a deputy chief of the Fair Russia party claimed a legislative norm of this kind might trigger 'a tidal wave of squealing'.

In addition, the decree contains an item urging the officials "who have organizational and distributive powers over other officials" to take measures towards prevention of the conflicts of interests and forcible participation in public associations and, above that, towards prevention of corruption.

The new rules demand that public officials "observe neutrality ruling out any possible impact of political parities on their occupational decisions."

The law, however, does not ban government officials' membership of political parties.

The regulations set certain limits to the officials' speaking in public. More specifically, they are required to refrain from public assessments of the activity of state agencies and their leaders unless such assessing is part of their professional duties.

Another discouragement concerns the measuring of Russia's economic performance in foreign currencies.

"The government officials are expected from now on to refrain from naming the value of commodities, works, services, and other objects of civil law located on the territory of the Russian Federation in foreign currency, except for the cases where this is necessary for a precise interpretation of data."

The provision for contacts with mass media has been expanded. Any public official is to respect the media and to assist their attempts to get information. Simultaneously, the decree requires that "they observe the rules for public speeches and disclosures of departmental information that apply to government institutions."

These regulations, however, leave out the Prime Minister, the federal ministers, judges and legislators, the Vedomosti newspaper quotes Vladimir Yuzhakov, a senior expert at the Center for Strategic Developments as saying.

The rules for these categories of the officialdom cannot be spelt out in a decree and a special law must be drafted for them, Yuzhakov believes.

Besides, appropriate mechanisms of control do not exist yet, as neither the presidential decree nor - which is a weightier argument - the law on civil state service nor the anticorruption package offers any description of them.

Once these documents have been passed, it is important to find the officials who disregard the above said principles, and to subject them to public castigation so as to dissuade others from acting the same way, says Yevgeny Gontmakher, a member of the managing board of Insor foundation.

This is necessary to show that the new legislation more is something more than a scrap of paper it is written on and that it really works, that it really is a moral code and its non-execution entails criminal responsibility, he says.

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Source: Itar-Tass