April 29, Armenpress: A team of the OSCE observers that has arrived in Armenia to monitor next May 25 parliamentary elections, has established its headquarters today at Armenia Hotel in central Yerevan.
The long-term mission, composed of 28 experts representing 17 member countries is led by envoy Robert Berry. Sixteen monitors will soon be dispatched to different Armenian regions to watch how elections are being prepared on provincial level.
The team will be reinforced with another 250 monitors who are due to arrive in Armenia ahead of the election date. They will watch the process of voting, ballots calculation and tabulation.
“The mission members will be monitoring the election campaign, the work of mass media, administrative preparedness to handle the polls and resolution of election disputes. The compliance of election process with Armenia’s laws and with the democratic electoral principles will be in our focus,” Berry told a news conference today.
He said the preliminary conclusion of the mission will be published the next day after the elections and the final conclusion in a month. Berry said the OSCE mission will also assess how a set of the OSCE recommendation, suggested to the Armenian authorities after last month’s presidential elections, would be applied.
The OSCE and other international monitors had concluded both after the first and second round of presidential elections that the polls “fell short of meeting international standards and were marred by vote fraud and other irregularities.” The recommendations urge Armenian authorities to call accountable persons involved in vote rigging, ensure a bigger transparency of vote counting and avoid application of administrative arrests.
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