Secretary of Belarusian Central Election Commission: There are no OSCE’s standards

Secretary of the Belarusian Central Election Commission (CEC) Mikalai Lazavik thinks there are no OSCE’s standards, authors of the OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission Final Report on the “parliamentary election” apply to.

“A notion “OSCE’s standards” is rather indefinite today. As for today, there are no clear OSCE’s standards as such,” secretary of the Belarusian CEC told to Interfax.

According to M. Lazavik, “observers change standards depending the county where elections are held. What is democratic in Ukraine and Georgia is undemocratic in Belarus and Russia.”

M. Lazavik finds it “difficult to comment on the OSCE/ODIHR Final Report in general”. “Firstly, we need to get Russian version of the document, study and analyze it. Only after that we will be able to comment,” the CEC secretary said.

The OSCE/ODIHR has recently spread the final report noting that the “parliamentary elections” in Belarus didn’t meet OSCE’s standards.

The authors of the report stressed that “further substantial efforts are required if Belarus is to conduct genuinely democratic elections in line with OSCE

commitments”.

Among the shortcomings, the ODIHR noticed the fact that electoral law of Belarus “still does not allow genuine political competition, and equal treatment of election competitors by the authorities”.

Besides, restrictions imposed by the authorities to create formal equality to all candidates led to “a minimum in terms of meeting venues, campaign financing and access to the media”. Access to any additional resources was strictly constrained.

Experts note that the Electoral Code of Belarus “does not provide any clear mechanism for securely keeping the ballot boxes after the start of early voting, nor does it provide specific regulations for enhancing the integrity of the ballot”.

According to experts of the mission, all these facts create opportunities for falsifications.