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Good intentions will be tested at polling stations, says OSCE PA president

The good intentions of Lidziya Yarmoshyna, head of Belarus’ central election commission, will be tested through observation at polling stations, Riccardo Migliori, president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, said in an interview with BelaPAN on Wednesday.

If the central election commission instructs precinct commissions to act in an open and transparent manner while counting votes, international observers will highly appreciate this, Mr. Migliori said.

“We had a really long discussion with the head of the central election commission [on September 10] on subjects relating to Belarus’ electoral regulations,” he said. “The most important thing is that we were given a promise that international observers would have access to polling stations when ballots were being counted and tabulated.”

According to Mr. Migliori, during previous elections in Belarus, “we saw what cannot be seen in almost all other countries: when votes were about to be counted, observers were told to step 15 to 20 meters away from the table where the ballots were to be counted.”

“When I met with [then Foreign] Minister [Syarhey] Martynaw in Rome in early August, he told me that that had happened because the chairpersons of precinct commissions misunderstood some things,” Mr. Migliori said.

In addition, according to him, while meeting with Ms. Yarmoshyna, he asked why so few representatives of opposition groups had been admitted to election commissions and why Alyaksandr Milinkevich, leader of the Movement for Freedom who was a presidential candidate in 2006, had been denied registration as a parliamentary candidate.

“As for the registration denial for Mr. Milinkevich, we were told that the documents he had filed did not fully meet the requirements,” Mr. Migliori said. “We met with Mr. Milinkevich yesterday and he explained to us that he hadn't even been going to lodge a complaint because he considered the registration denial to be a politically motivated and premeditated decision.”

As for the poor representation of the opposition on election commissions, the central election commission explained that there had been very few applications from opposition activists and those filed had been granted, Mr. Migliori said.

He noted that about 90 observers representing the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and short-term observers of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights would monitor the voting process on September 23, the main polling day in the coming House of Representatives elections.

“We hope that we’ll cover some 10 to 15 percent of the more than 6,000 polling stations on the voting day and directly check whether there is access to the table on which ballots are counted and whether the vote is transparent and without pressure,” Mr. Migliori said. “We’ll test the good intentions of the head of the central election commission directly on the spot. We in Italy say, ‘If these are roses, they will blossom sooner or later.’ But for the time being, we have seen many thorns.”

Mr. Migliori pointed to the existence of political prisoners in Belarus as one of the thorns. “When potential candidates for election are in prison, it is clear that this is already a restriction,” he said. “This holds true for the case of Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine, the case of Zmitser Dashkevich in Belarus or a similar case in any other country.”

Mr. Migliori noted that representatives of the OSCE PA had asked the Belarusian authorities for permission to meet with political prisoners. “I asked Minister Martynaw for such an opportunity during our meeting in Rome,” he said. “We haven’t yet received any reply, but we hope very much that we’ll receive it before the elections.”

According to Mr. Migliori, Matteo Mecacci, head of the OSCE PA's observation mission for the elections who chairs the Assembly’s Committee on Democracy, Human Rights and Humanitarian Questions, is ready to go to any Belarusian city at any moment if such permission is given.