Russia and the EU were today embroiled in another major row after the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) said that it would not monitor next month’s presidential elections in Russia because of "severe restrictions" placed on it by Moscow.
The OSCE said it was boycotting the March 2 poll. Neither the OSCE’s election monitoring arm nor its parliamentary assembly would observe the vote – a move that will infuriate Russia and deal a severe blow to the election’s international credibility.
Today Christian Strohal, the head of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), said he had been forced to pull his mission out because of "severe restrictions" placed on his team by the Russian side.
"We made every effort in good faith to deploy our mission, even under the conditions imposed by the Russian authorities," he said in a statement on the ODIHR’s website.
He added: "We have a responsibility to all 56 participating states to fulfill our mandate, and the Russian Federation has created limitations that are not conducive to undertaking election observation in accordance with it."
The Vienna-based OSCE, which is dominated by European nations, although it also includes the US and several countries from central Asia, had wanted to send a team to Russia in December, Strohal said.
Instead, Moscow refused to issue an invitation until January 28 – and then invited only 70 observers, insisting they arrive just three days before polling day. Russia later agreed to allow most observers to come on February 20, an offer the ODIHR today said was unacceptable.
"An election is more than what happens on election day," Strohal noted. He added: "What is true for every election is also true for this one: transparency strengthens democracy; politics behind closed doors weakens it."
The comment appears to be a barbed reference to Vladimir Putin’s decision in December to publicly endorse Russia’s first deputy prime minister Dmitry Medvedev as his successor. The move virtually guarantees Medvedev a landslide victory. Medvedev has offered Putin the job of prime minister.
Medvedev already enjoys blanket state TV coverage and the support of the Kremlin’s formidable administrative machinery. Last month Russia’s election commission also disqualified Mikhail Kasyanov – the only genuine democratic challenger – from taking part in the presidential race.
The Kremlin is still fuming from its last standoff with the OSCE in December over Russia’s parliamentary elections. The OSCE’s parliamentary assembly described the poll for the State Duma as "not fair" and highlighted numerous flaws including the "unprecedented abuse" of office by Putin himself.
The observers said there were at least four major areas of concern. They included "strong bias" in the media in favor of Putin’s United Russia party and "widespread" reports of harassment of Russia’s opposition party.
Additionally, Putin’s "unprecedented" personal endorsement for United Russia amounted to an "illegitimate merging of a political party and the state", it said.
"If Russia is a managed democracy then this was a managed election," Luc van den Brande, the head of the parliamentary assembly (PACE) remarked acidly.
Today Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, hit back, accusing the OSCE of double standards and calling for the organization to be urgently reformed. The OSCE had behaved "harshly and rudely", he suggested.
"The OSCE/ODIHR invented its own rules. The main problem with these rules is that they are totally non-transparent. We cannot understand why they are insisting so harshly and rudely on sending their mission here a month before the ballot and doing God only knows what," he said.
He said the OSCE had delivered Russia nothing less than an "ultimatum" to agree to its terms. "Countries respecting themselves do not accept ultimatums," Lavrov observed. "We regret this approach, which makes the need for reforming this institution even more urgent."
The ODIHR’s spokesman Curtis Budden said that so far Russia was the only country ever to have placed restrictions on its staff – during December’s Duma elections and the presidential elections on March 2. The ODIHR had sent 387 observers to cover Russia’s last presidential election in 2004 and had covered all previous Russian elections, he said.
In a separate statement, the OSCE’s parliamentary assembly said it had notified the chairman of the Russian State Duma that it was unable to accept an invitation to monitor the elections.
"We regret that circumstances prevent us from observing this election," the assembly’s secretary general, R. Spencer Oliver, said in a statement.
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