“Helsinki Association” Chairman Mikael Danielyan and Foreign Observers Talking on the Violations of Parliamentary Elections

Human rights defenders witnessed gatherings at the polling stations, who without permission, freely enter into electoral districts, interfere with the voting procedure, frighten or bribe the citizens, who are brought together with groups for voting. “At this time all the violations are done openly. A new feature for this elections has become stamps, which disappear within an hour and let the same person vote for several times,” – mentioned Danielyan. According to his words in this regard the most risky are those electoral districts, which include a large number of citizens, who either do not live in Armenia for a along time or died or acquired citizenship in another country. Armenian human right defender also pointed to “the strange style of working” of observers from CIS and OSCE, who “come to the polling stations for only 15 minutes and disappear”. This fact is reflected in the registration book, where in front of the abovementioned missions, e.g. is registered 09:00-09:15. “The behaviour of the representatives of local NGO “Your Choice” is very interesting. The guys with brand T-shirts are just walking in the electoral districts and do not interfere in, completely ignore obvious violations”,- said M. Danielyan. The representative of Human Rights Defender Network “Human Rights House” Nikoloz Legalishvili noted that chaotic crowd of people is observed at the polling stations. “In one and the same school there may be located 2-3 polling stations, which do not divide among themselves the indispensable blocking. The police do not respond to the disorder in the election process. Also we have fixed violations related to the wrong arrangement cabins, when a person passing to the cabin can easily be seen by the other voter.” While talking on the problem of the stamp disappearence ahead of time, the Georgian human rights defender mentioned that they were able to establish that there were manganese crystals in the composition of ink. Legalishvili also noted that with the arrival of human rights defenders, the situation at the polling stations are not changed in particular. “And in the polling station №8/7 in Malatia they refused to let me in. Later on under one of the polling booths 6 ballots were discovered.” Human rights defenders also pointed to the fact that despite to the prohibition on agitation on the election day, the city and the polling stations are full of posters and candidate pictures.

information source: http://www.epress.am