10/11/2011 President
Strasbourg, 10.11.2011 - “Election observation increases public confidence in the democratic process and the democratic institutions,” today stressed PACE President Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu in St. Petersburg, on the occasion of the seminar on elections monitoring organised by the Interparliamentary Assembly of the CIS member nations. “The presence of trusted observers pressure on the protagonists of the political process to set up a proper framework and respect the rules,” he said.
Due to the proliferation of observer delegations and groups involved in election observation, he added that it was essential to agree on common standards and methods for election observation, and underlined the Council of Europe and the PACE had made a huge contribution to their development, working extensively with their international partners.
“Using the same standards of reference is not enough, and we should also try to harmonise, as much as possible, our approaches to assessing the free and fair character of elections,” he said, welcoming the concept of institutional partnership, within the framework of international election observation missions, which may comprise observer delegations from PACE, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and the OSCE ODIHR, the European Parliament, and, on occasion, NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
During his visit to St Petersburg, Mr Çavuşoğlu also hold a bilateral meeting with the Chairman of the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation Vladimir Churov.