Melkonyants: Government wants to reduce the number of independent election observers

At the end of the last week, the latest amendments aimed at encumbering election observation were published. As RBC informed, this time the amendments are applied to the media.

The deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Constitutional Law and State Building Dmitry Vyatkin, representing the ‘United Russia’, has delivered legislative amendments stipulating additional requirements for journalists on the polling day:

1. Only those journalists who were well in advance accredited by election commission would be entitled to observe elections at the polling station on the Election Day.
2. A journalist shall obtain accreditation three days prior to the Election Day.
3. Only those journalists who work in the editorial office for at least two months under an employment contract or is paid on the basis of an independent contractor agreement are entitled to accreditation.

According to the co-chairman of the movement ‘Golos’ Grigory Melkonyants, the government wants to drastically reduce the number of independent election observers. ‘Currently the legal concept of independent election observation does not exist in Russia: non-governmental organizations are only allowed to nominate election observers in the name of candidates and parties or media. The first option denotes the actual observers’ dependence. By restricting election observation for media representatives, the government drastically reduce the number of civil election observers’, - he says. According to him, the movement was planning to nominate the freelance correspondents representing the newspaper ‘Civic Voice’ or other media partners as unpaid election observers, as the movement cannot afford to pay for their work. The amendments also affect the media, as after receiving the accreditation, the media representatives will not be able to replace their correspondents or their location on the polling day, as he said.

We would like to remind that the amendments requiring prior notification of the observers’ deployment plan to the polling stations have been already adopted, as well as provisions limiting the number of observers nominated by a candidate or a party up to two persons. Moreover, it was provisioned that only court can take a decision to expel election observers and media representatives from polling stations.