European Parliament elections process showed need for further harmonization, OSCE/ODIHR report says

WARSAW, 22 September 2009 - The conduct of the June 2009 elections to the European Parliament underlined the continued need for further harmonization and improvement, concluded a report published today by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).

"This was the first time we assessed a European Parliament election - the largest electoral event in the OSCE area, involving almost half the OSCE's participating States," said Ambassador Janez Lenarcic, ODIHR's director.

He stressed the importance of analysing the election process on the basis of OSCE commitments and other international standards, in particular in view of the European Parliament's growing legislative powers directly affecting some 500 million people in the OSCE area.

"Our report highlights a number of areas for improvement and offers recommendations on how to move forward," Lenarcic said.

The report says the elections' complexities, limited interest among the electorate and declining voter turnout, as well as the specificities of national election legislation, underline the need for reviewing aspects of the legal and administrative framework governing these elections both at EU and national level.

But it also stresses that a high level of public confidence in the electoral process and national electoral management bodies was evident in the countries visited.

A group of 23 experts from 19 OSCE participating States split up into smaller teams and visited a total of 15 European Union member states between 11 and 30 May.

The scale and nature of the elections, which essentially consisted of 27 separate national elections to a supra-national body, dictated an innovative approach going beyond the usual ODIHR methodology for election assessments.

The report, including the experts' findings as well as a set of recommendations is available from the OSCE website.