Need for fair assessment of upcoming elections in Georgia and Azerbaijan stressed

The Co-Chair of the EaP CSF Krzysztof Bobinski stressed the need to ensure a fair assessment of the elections in Georgia and Azerbaijan in a recent article on European Voice.

Since many elections in the EaP countries in the past have fallen short of European standards, an honest assessment of the elections by international observers – and especially by the teams from various parliamentary assemblies – is the more important. However, the trust of the populations in those observers has been undercut in the past, as has been shown by demonstrations during the presentation of the results of ODIHR’s election monitoring in Armenia this year.

Mr Bobinski stressed that a failure to deliver on the expectations of the populations will lead to a fall in credibility of the parliamentary observation bodies. Furthermore, he underlined the need for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, to select observers, whose quality, professionalism and lack of bias is beyond question, as the people selected “will shape the image of Europe’s democratic institutions in the eyes of Eastern Partnership Societies”.

The full article of Krzysztof Bobinski is available here.

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