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Authors of Electoral Code amendments said to have ignored almost all OSCE recommendations

The recently adopted amendments to Belarus` Electoral Code reflect only one of the 25 recommendations of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), Aleh Hulak, chairman of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee, told reporters in Minsk on Friday.

The House of Representatives gave second-reading approval to the bill of amendments on November 13.

A recommendation that the state media should be required to provide balanced and impartial coverage of the activities of all parties and candidates during elections was the only one that found its qay into the amended Electoral Code, Mr. Hulak said. However, the new provision applies to both state and private media outlets, he said. He noted that it would be strange to expect some party newspaper to give equal treatment to all candidates. The new provision may only actually aggravate the situation and make Belarusian elections even more lackluster, he said.

According to Mr. Hulak, the Electoral Code now allows authorities to use the newly introduced population register to draw up lists of eligible voters. OSCE/ODIHR experts actually recommended drawing up a centralized list of eligible voters in Belarus to prevent multiple registration, he said.

Mr. Hulak noted that the bill of amendments mainly applied to parliamentary and presidential elections and not local elections. He expressed skepticism that the electoral process in Belarus would improve.

Valyantsin Stefanovich, deputy chairman of a human rights organization called Vyasna, said that human rights defenders disapproved of the recently adopted Electoral Code amendments. He pointed out that the amended Electoral Code does not guarantee the right of election observers to properly monitor the ballot-counting process and the right of the political parties to include their representatives in election commissions of all levels, and does not require authorities to draw up an exhaustive list of valid reasons for voters to cast their ballots early.

The amendments will actually make it more difficult for candidates to conduct their campaigns because they will no longer receive any money from the government for printing campaign material and will have to rely solely on their own campaign funds, Mr. Stefanovich said.

He also criticized a new provision of the Electoral Code that bans campaigning for an election boycott. //BelaPAN