Aleh Hulak: Authorities Not To Hold “Elections” Transparently

The CEC has ignored the recommendation to change the vote counting practices.

Chairman of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee, human rights activist Aleh Hulak said that to Radio Svaboda, commenting on today's Lukashenka’s statement, which says that a part of the OSCE ODIHR recommendations will be taken into account at the “parliamentary elections” on September 11.

“After each observation, we, human rights activists, form our recommendations and suggestions. After the last “presidential campaign” we sent such a document to the CEC. But as it had been voiced that the CEC is working on the implementation of recommendations of the OSCE, we were primarily focused on how, in our view, it was possible and important to implement these recommendations.

Indeed, there are issues which entail to change the legislation quite substantially. But there are recommendations that require only adjustments and they could be resolved by the decision of the Central Election Commission.

From the response that we have received, it follows that the Central Election Commission considers some of our proposals incorrect. For example, the Central Election Commission does not agree that the procedure of vote counting is to be made public, for all the members of the Electoral Commission to monitor the counting process. This procedure is not spelled out in the Electoral Code and the CEC could resolve that problem. But they leave it up to precinct commissions to decide on the votes counting,” – the human rights activist said.

Aleh Hulak added that the Central Election Commission decided to discuss the improvement of electoral legislation with Lukashenka, because it is not so much a legal question for the authorities, as a political one:

“If this question concerned the legal procedure exclusively, the interdepartmental expert group’s conclusions would have been voiced long ago. But the CEC decided to discuss it with Lukashenka first. So we see a political approach here.”

We remind that observers were restricted in their observations during the counting of votes at the last “presidential elections.” OSCE recognized the “elections” non-transparent and demanded a comprehensive reform of the electoral legislation of Belarus on the basis of its recommendations.