On 14 March members of the project “Election Observation: Theory and Practice” and Hanna Azemsha and Palina Brodik were to conduct training for observers to local elections but their car was stopped by traffic police. Participants of the project were brought allegedly on suspicion of committing an accident to the police department of the Frunzenski district of Minsk, where the police confiscated the printed materials needed for the training.
A few days after the incident, on 16 March, one of the main state television channels in the country broadcasted a programme dedicated to the topic of coming elections. The journalist said that she had found a booklet of the project in her mailbox with the call to monitor the elections and algorithm of observation. She then asked the CEC secretary Mikalai Lazavik a naive question: “Is it even legal?”.
Mikalai Lazavik recalled such election observation initiatives as “Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections” and “For Fair Elections”. He explained that their emergence and activities was not based on interest of the citizens in the electoral process, but on a desire “not spending a lot of work on election monitoring, using the results of other citizens’ work, to collect at least some material, to summarize it and present it to the foreign sponsors.” Lazavik also said that the project “Election Observation: Theory and Practice” – is “the activity of 4-5 students of the European Humanities University, which is not even located in Belarus. “ It should be noted that, more than a hundred people from different regions of Belarus became observers of the project “Election Observation: Theory and Practice” only in this election. In this case, one can only guess whether the CEC secretary knows so little about the work of the observers or intentionally distorts information.
The project team, in turn, said that despite all the obstacles and attempts to affect the work of the participants, the monitoring will go as planned: “It is very interesting that our detention coincided with the comments made by Lazavik on television, it would be naive to consider it a fluke. Authorities are trying to use all its resources from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the media to somehow interfere with our work. We do not change our plans. We were going to observe and will do so in spite of all the obstacles made for us. We are not doing anything illegal, so we have nothing to be afraid. Interest by the authorities can be explained only by the fact that we are going the right way and we have been accepted as a force that can affect something.”
The project “Election Observation: Theory and Practice” provides the young Belarusians with a unique opportunity to see the political processes from the inside, to get acquainted with the way they work, to learn about the experience of independent observers from Belarus and to gain practical skills via actual observation of elections in the neighboring countries.The project works in civic observation. In the Belarusian context, this allows you to not be associated with any political parties or movements. Civic observers have a chance to monitor the electoral process and the procedure for the formation of authorities from inside.
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