OSCE Chair appoints parliamentarians to lead election observation in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Russia

COPENHAGEN, 6 October 2003 - The OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Netherlands Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has appointed OSCE PA President Bruce George as his Special Co-ordinator to lead the upcoming OSCE Election Observation Missions in Georgia and Russia, and Vice-President Giovanni Kessler as his Special Co-ordinator to lead the Election Observation Mission in Azerbaijan.

Vice-President Giovanni Kessler will lead the OSCE Election Observers during the Azerbaijani presidential elections on 15 October and deliver the preliminary post-election statement on 16 October, in conjunction with other appropriate officials. The OSCE parliamentary observer team to Azerbaijan includes 17 representatives of the OSCE PA from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and the United States.

PA President Bruce George will lead the OSCE Election Observers during the Georgian parliamentary elections on 2 November, as well as the Russian parliamentary elections on 7 December, and deliver the preliminary post-election statements on 3 November and 8 December, respectively, in conjunction with other official election observers.

The OSCE Election Observation Missions are joint efforts between the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. Since 1993, the OSCE PA has provided political leadership to numerous OSCE Election Observation Missions, in close co-operation with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. The OSCE Observation Missions assess the conduct of the elections, the political campaign and the role of the media.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE, created by the CSCE Summit in Paris in 1990, is the parliamentary wing of the 55-nation Organization. The primary task of the 317 member Assembly is to facilitate inter-parliamentary dialogue, an important aspect of the overall effort to meet the challenges of democracy throughout the OSCE area.