In general, parliamentarian election in Armenia met commitments taken by country in front of CoE

PanARMENIAN.Net - In general, parliamentarian election in Armenia met the commitments taken by the country in front of the Council of Europe, Leo Platvoet, the head of PACE mission on observing parliamentarian elections of Armenia stated, speaking in the opening of PACE's summer session in Strasbourg.



"The May 12 parliamentarian elections in Armenia were held mostly in accordance with the commitments taken in front of the CoE and democratic standards. However, shortcomings still remain. Armenian authorities, as well as other participants of the electoral processes displayed political will for improving the process of organizing elections, though some problems remain yet," Platvoet stressed.



According to the rapporteur, shortcomings and inaccuracies some of which are rather serious, were fixed in the vote counting process, which casts shadow on the preliminary positive evaluation.



"After gaining independence not a single election was held in compliance with democratic standards in Armenia. "The May 12, 2007 parliamentarian elections became a "try cock", which demonstrated Armenia's political wish to organize true democratic elections. Unfortunately, it seems that the greater part of opposition parties lost the support of people and weakened its positions after deciding to boycott the constitutional referendum in 2005," the report underlines.



The document also says that the Electoral Code of Armenia is highly complicated and contains a lot of elements that would be rather regulated by decisions of the Central Electoral Commission. Connected with the adoption of the law on Dual Citizenship, in fact the decision to organize elections only on the territory of Armenia deprived the greater part of the Armenian nation of their civil rights, taking into account the large Armenian Diaspora. And the most problematic issue in the sphere of impartiality became the fact that representatives of opposition were not included in electoral commissions," Leo Platvoet says, RFE RL reports. It is worth mentioning that there were no debates on the report in the session.