OSCE told about legal casus with Lukashenka’s initiative group

The ODIHR OSCE mission has visited Minsk to get acquainted with the situation in the run-up to the presidential election.

On September 29 a meeting of the leaders of the campaign “Human Rights Activists for Free Elections” with representatives of the ODIHR/OSCE, which is on the working visit in Minsk since September 26.

The chairman of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee Aleh Hulak and a deputy chairman of the Human Rights centre “Viasna” Valyantsin Stefanovich answered numerous questions of the OSCE representatives, studied principles of work of Belarusian independent observers during the election campaign. Europeans were also greatly interested in changes of the electoral legislation of Belarus and analysis of different situations by human rights activists, in which rigging election results is possible.

Human rights activists have also noted the practice of manipulations with the list of voters, which took place during the last elections. “Lists of voters in each polling station are concealed, they are not shown to me as an observer, and they could be demonstrated to me only in a case when I am registered in this polling station as a voter and came to cast my vote,” Stefanovich said.

To the question of the OSCE representatives, why independent observers were not put on newly formed territorial election commissions, Valyantsin Stefanovich and Aleh Hulak noted that joining election commissions was not a task of human rights activists from the start, as they are only to observe the process of the election campaign. Moreover, Belarusian human rights activists expressed an opinion that representatives of public associations should not join election commissions at all. The reason for such an opinion, they explained, was the practice when most members of the election commissions were members of the Red Cross, organizations of Afghan War veterans and so on, – that is, organizations which take an obviously pro-regime stand.

The OSCE representatives also asked questions about registration of initiative groups of presidential aspirants. The human rights activists shortly dwelt upon legal casus with Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s initiative group, who had been submitting documents not in person, but through a authorised person, and Syarhei Haidukevich, who put a member of the Central Election Commission on his election group (as it turned out later, without his knowledge).

One of the sensitive issues of the discussion was the topic of the Article 193.1 in the Criminal Code of Belarus (activities on behalf of unregistered organizations), which had not been cancelled. In combination with systematic denials to register many organizations, including the human rights centre “Viasna”, such a legislation puts not only opposition representatives at threat of criminal persecution for their activities during the election campaign.