Commonwealth of Independent States: Covenant on Advertising Activity

IRIS 2004-1:1/36

Andrei Richter

Comenius University (Bratislava)

The Covenant on cooperation of Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States in the regulation of advertising activity was adopted on behalf of Council of the Heads of Governments of the CIS by the Council on Economics of the Commonwealth of Independent States at its session in Moscow on 19 December 2003 and signed by 9 out of the 12 Member States.

The Covenant has 19 articles and is a continuation of the policy laid down in the CIS Treaty on concerted antimonopoly policy of 25 January 2000 and the CIS Covenant on major guidelines of activity to protect the rights of consumers, of the same date.

The Covenant calls for the harmonization of the national advertising law, coordination of activity of governmental control bodies, and common efforts to monitor the CIS market of advertising services (Article 6).

By advertising the Covenant understands “distribution of information about a physical person or legal entity, goods, ideas or projects in any form with the help of any media, which is intended for an indeterminate group of persons and is aimed at forming or supporting interest in such physical persons, legal entities, goods, ideas and projects and facilitating the sale of goods, ideas and projects”. Inappropriate advertising is any unfair, unauthentic, unethical, knowingly untrue and other advertisements that violate the requirements regarding their content, timing, location and method of dissemination as established by the national legislations (Article 1).

Article 10 of the Covenant demands that advertising be recognizable. It is forbidden to disseminate untrue information in advertising, to violate accepted norms of morality and decency, to abuse the trust of consumers, to abuse the inexperience of children, to incite to violent actions, and to give an impression of guaranteed effectiveness of medicine, etc.

Coordination of activity to implement the Covenant shall be done by the Interstate Council on antimonopoly established by the above-mentioned Treaty (Article 12).