Final findings on Belarus election to be ready within a month, ODIHR says

2001-09-19 17:50:00

Minsk, 19 September. The International Limited Election Observation Mission will release its final findings on Belarus' presidential election within a month, Radio Racyja said with reference to the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). Reports of the kind usually take at least two months to draw up, but the Mission is trying to finish the work as early as possible, considering the amount of interest in the September 9 election, the ODIHR's Branimir Radev is cited saying. The purpose of the Mission is to establish whether the vote was democratic or not, and it is up to the OSCE as a whole to recognize or not recognize the election, he stressed. The Mission is a joint effort of the ODIHR and the Parliamentary Troika composed of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly and the European Parliament. In its preliminary findings released on September 10, the Mission declared that the Belarusian election "failed to meet the OSCE commitments for democratic elections."