Disinfo: The OSCE's refusal to send observers to the Russian elections aims to question its legitimacy later

Summary

The refusal of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to send observers to the Russian elections aims to create an artificial scandal around the election in order to question its legitimacy later.

Disproof

Pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about the OSCE as allegedly biased against Russia and a political tool used by Western countries.

This claim was neither counterbalanced nor critically challenged in the article.

The OSCE made a decision not to send observers to monitor the Duma elections because Russian authorities had limited the number of observers it could send to the elections. OSCE institutions had been invited to observe the vote scheduled for 17-19 September 2021, but were subsequently restricted to sending 60 observers. For the upcoming parliamentary elections in Russia, an OSCE needs assessment mission deployed in May to June 2021 found that a mission with 80 long-term observers and 420 short-term observers was needed to provide an independent credible assessment.

Matteo Mecacci, Director of OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, (ODIHR) commented on the matter as follows:

"We very much regret that our observation of the forthcoming elections in Russia will not be possible, but the ability to independently determine the number of observers necessary for us to observe effectively and credibly is essential to all international observation. The insistence of the Russian authorities on limiting the number of observers we could send without any clear pandemic-related restrictions has unfortunately made today’s step unavoidable".

Russian authorities cited the sanitary-epidemiological situation in the Russian Federation as the reason for the limitations. The OSCE said that no pandemic-related entry restrictions or rules about operating and moving within the country would seem to prevent the deployment of a full election observation mission in line with ODIHR’s initial assessment.

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  • Reported in: Issue 256
  • DATE OF PUBLICATION: 06/08/2021
  • Article language(s) Arabic
  • Countries and/or Regions discussed in the disinformation: Russia
  • Keywords: OSCE, Elections
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