Expert: destructive role of OSCE led to Belarus refusing its election monitoring services

Belarus is holding Single Voting Day for the first time to elect deputies of all levels – including to the House of Representatives, rural and village councils. Moreover, the President has always advocated for election monitoring, for the development of unified rules for evaluating election campaigns in the country. However, the OSCE observers, for example, came to Belarus with their own pre-prepared guidelines to ‘teach us lessons in democracy’. Political expert Piotr Petrovsky explained what principles are important for the state in terms of international election monitoring and ensuring its transparency.

 “As an organisation, over thirty years of co-operation with Belarus and other countries, the OSCE has managed to deeply discredit itself not only in election monitoring, but also in its biased, committed activities in Donbass, Karabakh, and other hot spots, where instead of impartial monitoring, the OSCE collected data in favour of one of the conflicting parties,” Mr. Petrovsky noted.

“In the case of the electoral process, OSCE observation missions became a tool of diplomatic pressure, and sometimes even outright interference in the electoral process. They often came to our country with ready-made guidelines: how to organise ‘democratic elections’, they introduced technologies used by the West, and prepared election and public sentiment monitoring in advance. Lacking any objective standards of election democracy enshrined in international treaties, OSCE representatives take it upon themselves to determine which elections and where are democratic or not. The openly destructive role of the OSCE has led to the Republic of Belarus, like some other countries, refusing its observation services,” the analyst added.