“The Civil Society has not participated in the initial stage of drafting the new Electoral Code, our country once again failed to fulfill the OSCE / ODIHR observation mission’s requirement that the discussion of the drafts should be inclusive”, said Heriqnaz Tigranyan, the Legal Adviser at Transparency International Anticorruption Center at today’s discussion.
“When the draft was presented to the government session, it was not published on the website of the Ministry of Justice, which means that the responsibility of presenting it to the public within 15 days has been violated. Thus, the process of legal acts provided by the RA law on Legal Acts was violated in the course of drafting the Code”, she said referring to drafting process of the document. With regard to the draft, Ms Tigranyan thinks that it is far from being satisfactory. “According to this draft, the appeal deadlines remain compact, as well as the range of subjects. The observer who has recorded the violations does not have the right to submit an application. The draft does not reflect the OSCE/ODIHR recommendation”.
According to the advocate, the electronic registration system embedded in the draft is sometimes confusingly called electronic voting. “The draft only offers electronic registration. There is a big problem here that is the voters’ register is not an interconnected system. It is impossible to check whether the same person voted in different polling stations of the RA or not”, she concluded.
