Central Election Commission Keeps Off Observers
// Europe has not been invited to the elections in Russia
December election to the State Duma might complicate Russia-Europe relations. According to Kommersant’s information, European international organizations have not yet been officially invited to send their observers to the parliamentary election scheduled for December 2. Europe is alarmed by Moscow’s persistent silence. Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) said the invitations will definitely be sent, but only after the registration of candidates. Meanwhile, the opposition believes the authorities might be intentionally cooling down the relations.
Observers of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) have been ready to go to Russia since September. “There is PACE Bureau’s decision as of September 13 on sending a 10-member pre-election mission and a 60-member main mission, but the problem is there was no invitation,” said Vladimir Dronov, chief advisor to PACE chairman, head of PACE department of inter-parliamentary cooperation and election monitoring. “We have already prepared a program. Yet, they said they’ll invite us only after the Central Election Commission is done registering the candidates of all parties. It is for the first time this way. I think we will get the invitation, but we’ll get it late,” said Dronov.
OSCE/ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights), the main European watchdog for election processes, is alarmed as well. ODIHR spokesperson Urdur Gunnarsdottir confirmed yesterday that there has been no invitation yet. “It is getting late and every day counts. As compared with 2003, Russia’s Central Election Commission is five weeks behind its own schedule. Four years ago, our observers have been working in Russia already for more that a month at that time,” recalled Gunnarsdottir. “Poland invited us to its election several weeks ahead. But it was an early election scheduled in a very short period of time. On the contrary, the upcoming election in Russia is regular, so it is unclear why there is such delay,” added Gunnarsdottir.
Urdur Gunnarsdottir hopes that the invitation is eventually issued, and that at least 400 OSCE/ODIHR observers go to Russia this year. There were 400 observers at last Duma election. However, it is not the record: there were 600 OSCE/ODIHR observers working at the September election to the Supreme Rada of Ukraine. “We hope to receive the invitation as soon as possible, because it will determine whether we have time to prepare thoroughly. Yet, one thing is clear: the later we receive it, the harder it will be for us to work,” the spokesperson said.
Andrei Davydov, head of the Central Election Commission’s external relations department, confirmed that none of observers had received the invitation yet. “The Russian law has never set any terms for inviting international observers. There are just our international liabilities, and we will fulfill them. As for when, each country determines it according to its internal procedures.”
The Central Election Commission (CEC) wants to send the invitations to international observers only after the election participants are registered (that procedure is to be over by no later than October 27). “Let’s see how many parties there are and how many candidates they have,” said Davydov. “Otherwise, we’ll have a ridiculous situation, if we have only 1,000 candidates and invite 5,000 observers. After the registration stage, we’ll start discussing the issue and we’ll decide within 2-3 weeks. There is no secret meaning hidden here,” added Davydov. Commenting on the OSCE official’s statement that last time observers were invited 2.5 months before the polling day, Davydov said it was 1.5, and not 2.5, months, and that the 2.5 period is written in “the OSCE program which is not an obligatory document”, and that it is due to their “love of long-term observing since an election’s very beginning”. “These are ODIHR fibs. I can imagine quite a number of these fibs. So, don’t worry for the OSCE, but worry for us,” asked the CEC official.
Just as Davydov supposed, every organization will supply “several tens” of observers each, and not 400 as the OSCE thinks. Davydov explained the CEC can invite more and the organizations can send more people, but it will “depend partially on their financial opportunities”. “There were 5,000 observers in Ukraine. So what?” the official asked. “Latvia, which is considered a strong democratic power, had only 20 observers. Two weeks before its election, Poland said it does not need international observers at all,” added Davydov.
OSCE and PACE observers can hope for invitations anyway, although not in the number they expected. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the State Duma Committee on Foreign Affairs, said that Russia is going to invite just 30 (and not 60) PACE observers. However, Russia will not invite European Parliament members at all. They fell out of favor in June 2007, after United Russia deputy Gadjimet Safaraliev charged the EU with attempt to interfere in the election campaign in Russia. The pretext was a fellowship of 23.5 million rubles granted by the EU to the European University in St. Petersburg and to the Ural State Service Academy for implementing the project called “Creation of an inter-region electoral network in Russia”.
Safaraliev viewed it as an attempt to form a system of independent monitoring of elections and alternative counting of votes. “It should be regarded as an attempt at direct interfering of a foreign quasi-state which the EU is,” said the deputy, demanding that the Prosecutor General’s Office investigate the case.
The European University in St. Petersburg believes that Safaraliev’s claims are groundless. “We did not plan counting the votes. We just wanted to implement an educational project aimed at making citizens familiar with the Russian law,” assured Nikolai Vakhtin, the university’s head. “We were going to print leaflets, and we are not the European Parliament’s agents,” he added. A sequence of prosecutor checks did not discover any violations in the way Russian universities spend European money. However, the CEC decided not to invite the EU observers.
The opposition members take the authorities’ actions differently. Communist Party deputy chairman Ivan Melnikov said the delay in inviting the international observers is due to “bureaucratic tardiness”. State Duma independent deputy and former leader of the liquidated Republican party Vladimir Ryzhkov also thinks that the international observers “will definitely be invited to the election, but at the very last moment”. “The Kremlin strongly needs them,” Ryzhkov believes, “because if foreign observers arrive to an election and do not find considerable violations of democratic rules in the campaign, the outcome of that election will then seem lawful to the international community.” So, Ryzhkov added that the OSCE observers and other international experts “will be allowed to watch just the last election procedure, -- the voting on December 2”. Ryzhkov predicted there will be “mass falsifications claiming higher voter turnout and higher results for the United Russia party, but the international observers will not be able to notice anything because there will be just a few tens of them in the country, while there are about 100,000 voting stations in Russia”. Thus, the observers will not see all other election procedures “during which the administrative resource will be used to aggressively promote the United Russia and to squeeze out the opposition parties”, said Ryzhkov.
On the contrary, SPS federal political council’s secretary Boris Nadezhdin believes that “none of the international observers will be invited” to the election in Russia. “They will be cut off just like the opposition parties are being cut off now, because both hamper Vladimir Putin to complete his personal task, -- ‘to maintain the stability’ -- which he understands only as securing the Duma majority for the United Russia,” said the expert. Nadezhdin thinks the authorities actually want as much scandal as possible, with the West accusing Russia of anything, because “one of the regime’s keystones is the myth that the West harms Russia wherever it can.'"
Mikhail Zygar, Vladimir Soloviev, Maria-Luisa Tirmaste, Viktor Khamraev
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 23, 2007
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