@Hoarsewhisperer, #3
Excerpt from a recent
interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (regarding the invitation of the ODIHR mission to Belarus):
... this Bureau, which is supposed to observe the elections, declares that it did not go to Belarus, as it was sent an invitation late. This, to put it mildly, is not true, because the only obligation of Belarus, like any other OSCE participating state, is "to invite international observers to national elections".
ODIHR approaches election observation in different ways east of Vienna, in the post-Soviet space on the one hand, and west of Vienna, especially in the United States, on the other. Somewhere 800 people are sent, somewhere 12, and somewhere no one at all. For example, the Bureau several times did not send observers to individual Baltic countries, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in Estonia and Latvia are deprived of the right to vote, since they have the status of “non-citizens” shameful for the European Union. For many years, Russia, together with its CIS partners, proposed once and for all to introduce clear rules for observing elections for everyone, so that it would be spelled out when to send an invitation, how many observers are sent within the vanguard, and how many, based on calculations per capita, are sent to observe directly the voting. We were refused. The most zealous refusals were made by those very countries that are now loudly declaring that the Bureau could not go to observe the elections [in Belarus] because it was not invited.
<...>
The Bureau, if it would be guided by what was actually agreed by the member countries, should not have "got into a pose" and said that "we were called too late". They had to go and observe [the elections] - in this case they would have more reason to declare the violations that they are now inflating in every possible way.
More lies and ultra-hypocrisy from tamed international agencies and bureaus. Nothing new.
Posted by:
alaff | Aug 19 2020 20:10 utc |
10