Yarmoshyna: “To send election legislation to OSCE is humiliation”
39- 11.12.2009, 10:48
The central Elections Commission chairperson has confirmed that she hadn’t submitted the amendments to the Electoral Code to the OSCE for approval.
As Interfax informs, it has been started by Lidziya Yarmoshyna, CEC chairperson, to journalists in the “parliament” in Minsk.
“We haven’t sent the draft law for approval of the OSCE. Tell me at least one sovereign state which would send its draft laws for approval of international organisations. It looks like humiliation,” Yarmoshyna said.
She stated that in February 2009 two joint sessions of the OSCE and Belarusian CEC experts took place. “At these sessions compromise offers were taken into account with the aim to improve the Belarusian electoral legislation. These proposals were also sent for analysis of the Foreign Ministry of Belarus. In fact all the preferences of the OSCE experts have been taken into account, but not for 100%,” Yarmoshyna said.
She noted that the offers of the OSCE experts mostly concerned facilitation of collection of signatures procedure, and participation of political parties in election commissions, except the CEC. A number of proposals, as Yarmoshyna said, for instance, concerning pre-election agitation, had been made by Belarusian experts. “I assure that Belarus has received constructive proposals on improvement of the Belarusian election legislation of the OSCE well,” said the chair of the Belarusian CEC.
Today deputies of the “chamber of representatives” have unanimously adopted the amendments to the election legislation in the second reading.
As charter97.org website informed, earlier the OSCE stated that they hadn’t received these amendments for examination despite of the previous agreements. As stated by the organisers of the international project “Election observation: theory and practice” they had no illusions that the amendments to the Electoral Code adopted by the “parliament”, would create a breakthrough level of democracy and transparency in the electoral process of the country.
