The Parliamentary Elections were not free or fair: Artur Sakunts
14:00, May 14, 2012 | News | Electoral Rights
“The elections held on May 6, 2012 were accompanied by many violations, such as: disappearing stamps in passports, rampant bribery as well as other violations,” reported Artur Sakunts, Chairman of Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor Office today, at a press conference.
“Bribes were distributed on the day of voting mainly by the Republican Party of Armenia; however, the Armenian Revolutionary Party and Prosperous Armenia Party also distributed bribes. Another major issue was that there were members of the commissions who were not aware of the legislation and therefore did not organize the voting process properly.
We registered violation cases concerning voting privacy as well as lack of organization in the voting polls. The long forgotten “merry-go-round” was also widely used. This is a unique phenomenon. There were also several cases of double voting, but not in large numbers,” he said,
According to Artur Sakunts, their observation mission proves that society does not trust the election process. .
“We consider that the elections were not free or fair. In our main report which will be released in several days we will publish numerous appeals, which were left unanswered, by the police and other law-enforcement bodies,” said the human rights activist, adding that the evaluations of the OSCE/ODIHR observations are not quite acceptable to him, and he would not even like to discuss the evaluations of the CIS observation.
“They are all from the countries of the former Soviet Union, with a dictatorial regime, where elections are not democratic, so what objective evaluation can they give us?” stated Sakunts.
Sakunts stated that long-term observations were implemented only in Vanadzor from April 8th until May 5th. 113 members of the organization implemented short-term observation on May 6th at District N 7, in Yerevan, Vanadzor, Gyumri and Ijevan. These results will be presented at a later date.
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