[Marcus Marulus]

West to boycott Duma elections

Sunday, November 18, 2007

MOSCOW: The Russian opposition politician and former World Champion Chess player Garry Kasparov called on Saturday on the West not to send any election monitors to the Duma elections similar to the OSCE.

‘The elections have succumbed to a decorative means of concealing the totalitarian character of the regime,’ Kasparov said on his website.

‘Europe is turning away from Russia,’ the Moscow-based financial daily commented Saturday.

The Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe’s refusal to send monitors to the elections on December 2 could exacerbate relations between Europe and Russia, the daily added.

After months of wrangling with Russian authorities, OSCE election monitors concluded Friday that delays and restrictions had made it impossible to monitor the parliamentary elections.

The ODIHR, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, set out to fulfill ‘conscientiously’ its mandate ‘in spite of the delayed receipt of an invitation from the Russian authorities to observe and unprecedented restrictions introduced in the invitation,’ the Warsaw-based organisation said in a press release on Friday.

‘It was a very difficult decision that was not taken lightly,’ ODIHR spokeswoman Urdur Gunnarsdottir said. ‘We take our work seriously.’ Russian authorities had continuously denied applications for entry visas for the planned deployment of 20 ODIHR experts on November 7 and 50 observers on November 15, the election watchdog said. Reacting to ODIHR complaints over the slow visa process, Moscow said the election monitors had been ‘unable to fill out the simple application forms properly.’

Russia drastically slashed the number of international monitors for the Duma elections, inviting only 70 ODHIR observers, compared to 400 in previous ballots. Despite the setback, the organization hopes for an official invitation to monitor the upcoming presidential elections on March 2, 2008.

[source]