OSCE ODIHR Officials Set to Monitor Local Elections in Minsk :: Charter'97 :: News

Human rights experts of the OSCE ODIHR mission arrived in Minsk. On February 26 morning the organization’s representatives met with the secretary of the Central Electoral Commission Nikolai Lozovik. In his interview to BelaPAN the secretary said that the visitors aren’t entitled to be observers at elections and they never asked the Central Electoral Commission to endow them with such a status. The goal of the mission, said Lozovik, is to carry out monitoring of the election campaign.

According to Lozovik, in course of today’s meeting the ODIHR experts inquired from him about the way they organized electoral campaign and also addressed CEC with a request to let them visit on March 2 – the official voting day in Belarus – several polling stations and commissions. Lozovik responded that they would surely do that, while CEC is ready to present all the necessary information to foreign experts.

Today the ODIHR officials met with representatives of parties, which are part of the Confederation “For social changes” – Liberal-Democratic Party, Party of communists of Belarus, Belarusian Social-Democratic Party (Narodnaya Gromada), Belarusian Labor Party and Belarusian Female Party “Nadzeya”.