The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) officially launched on Tuesday its observation mission for snap parliamentary elections that will be held in Armenia next month.
The mission is led by Urszula Gacek, a former Polish parliamentarian and diplomat. It will initially consist of 13 election experts from the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). They will be joined soon by 24 long-term election observers to be deployed by the ODIHR in various parts of Armenia.
The Warsaw-based body will then ask OSCE member states to provide some 250 short-term observers who will monitor voting and ballot counting in polling stations across the country on election day.
As was the case in just about every major Armenian election held in the past, the OSCE mission will first evaluate the conduct of the December 9 vote jointly with other monitors representing the European Parliament and the Council of Europe. Their findings will be critical for the international legitimacy of the polls resulting from last spring’s mass protests that brought down Armenia’s previous government.
Gacek insisted that the dramatic regime change, widely describe as a democratic “velvet revolution,” will not prejudge the OSCE’s assessment of the upcoming elections.
“We come with no preconceived ideas of how this election will be conducted,” she told a news conference in Yerevan. “We will use the same standards and approaches that were used in the previous elections.”
Observers deployed by the OSCE and other pan-European structures gave a mixed assessment of Armenia’s last parliamentary elections held in April 2017. They cited “credible information about vote-buying and pressure on civil servants and employees of private companies” but reported no significant instances of multiple voting. They also said that the Armenian authorities generally respected “fundamental freedoms” during the election campaign.
Armenia’s current government and law-enforcement bodies have pledged to prevent vote buying and other types of serious fraud. They essentially managed to do that in recent municipal elections in Yerevan.
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