Sunday Leader Presidential Elections 2010 13 January 2010 111 views No Comment  Print This Post  Email This Post

2010-01-10 00:25:30

Dayananda Dissanayake

By Nirmala Kannangara

With election laws openly flouted and the number of incidents of violence soaring, local election bodies have expressed their apprehension over the unlikely participation of top international observers to monitor this month’s presidential election.

Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake has also come under flak from these local bodies for his failure to ensure the participation of international election monitors at the polls.

Although the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), the Commonwealth Secretariat (CS) and the Association of Asian Election Authority (AAEA) have been invited to monitor the presidential polls, only the CS and AAEA have confirmed their participation, while the EU has rejected the invitation. The UN has said that the time given for them was inadequate to send observers to the country.

“The Elections Commissioner has the power to extend invitations to foreign missions in the country to bring down reputed election observers from their respective countries. However due to unknown reasons he did not do so but only invited a very few whom he knew would not send their delegations,” local observers told The Sunday Leader.

According to them, as a result and as expected the EU rejected the offer due to Sri Lanka’s failure to implement the recommendations they made after the 2005 presidential polls for a free and fair election. It was the same with the UN although they gave another reason for not attending.

“We as local observers are happy that the more credible CS is sending several  observers, but we do not have any faith in the AAEA who declared the controversial Eastern Provincial Council election in 2008 as a free and fair election,” the observers opined.

Meanwhile the Elections Department spokesperson told The Sunday Leader that the CS and the AAEA have confirmed their participation and added that they would arrive in the country on January 20.

“The CS has said that they would be sending 12-15 observers while 50 monitors will represent the AAEA. In addition more than 12,000 local monitors would monitor the election but only PAFFREL and CMEV would be allowed to go into the polling booths,” the Department’s spokesman said.

Referring to election laws, the Spokesperson said that it was pity to note that the Ministry Secretaries and public officers continue to ignore the election guidelines issued by the Elections Commissioner.

“In order to control the state media the Commissioner appointed a Competent Authority and gave orders to the police to remove all banners and cutouts but if these officials do not implement his orders what else could he do?” the spokesperson claimed.

However Executive Director, PAFFREL, Roxana Hettiaratchi told The Sunday Leader that he expects more violence and violation of election laws in the days to come as the number of such incidents has seen a sharp increase compared to the 2005 election violations.

“PAFFREL will be getting down 20 international monitors while 6,500 local observers would be deployed at the election. Since there are tendencies for election violence in the north and the east, the foreign monitors would be deployed to the north and the east to keep a close watch,” Hettiaratchi added.

Meanwhile Media Spokesperson for Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE) Keerthi Tennakoon told The Sunday Leader that they are yet to decide how many local observers CaFFE would be deploying at the forthcoming election.

“It is too early to say how many monitors we would be sending, but certainly we are ready to send an adequate number of observers to cover all the districts in the country,” added Tennakoon. According to Tennakoon it is high time for the Elections Commissioner to implement the recommendations the international election observers have recommended to ensure free and fair elections.

Read more / the original here:
http://www.thesundayleader.lk/2010/01/10/foreign-monitors-shunned/

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