Last week, MPs passed the draft law No. 6480 on geographical definitions of alcoholic beverages as a basis.

However, this could lead to corruption in the alcohol market.

What's wrong with the new draft law?

According to the draft, a geographical indication of an alcoholic beverage is a place name that identifies an alcoholic beverage originating from a particular country or region. This designation is important if the special quality, reputation, or other characteristics of the alcoholic beverage are mainly due to this geographical place of origin.

But we found a number of corruption risks here:

The specially authorised body will be able to arbitrarily set requirements for the specification of alcoholic beverages.Imagine what these requirements could be and the ‘rewards’ to meet them. In addition, the draft creates the possibility of setting requirements for a specific manufacturer.

There is no clear and transparent procedure for approving changes to the specification of an alcoholic beverage.

The draft law allows for unreasonable refusal to issue a certificate and unreasonable restrictions on its validity.

The conformity assessment bodies will be able to suspend the certificate of conformity of an alcoholic beverage to the specification requirements at their discretion.

The specially authorised body will have the right to interfere unreasonably with the activities of conformity assessment bodies.

 

All this can lead to corruption in this area. Therefore, all these risks should be eliminated from the document.

TheInstitute of Legislative Ideas does not object to the adoption of the draft law, provided that it is finalised with due regard to the comments made. More details in our conclusion.