Why OSCE/ODIHR and similar observers were not invited to elections in Belarus

On February 25, 2024 a single day of voting will be held in Belarus. The deputies of the House of Representatives and local councils will be elected. This is an important political campaign for the country. And, of course, destructive forces in the guise of fugitive, destructive oppositionists and European officials are already doing everything to discredit the event that has not yet taken place.

Piatras Auštryavicius, Member of the European Parliament from Lithuania:

We do not recognize this zoological garden and we look at it with a great deal of humor, because I cannot explain the so-called elections in any other way.

"If you want to convince that you have elections, invite international observers, no, not your acquaintances, but those who have the appropriate reputation, like the OSCE / ODIHR or the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. But they were not invited, why?" - asks the opposition politician.

Now we will explain why the OSCE/ODIHR and their kind were not invited. The destructive opposition will not say anything about it.

First of all, our country is ours, whoever we want, we invite.

Secondly, why such questions are not asked to the 18 states of America, which decided to do without observers, why they are not asked to the authorities of Finland and Poland? Or is it different?

The OSCE/ODIHR traditionally sends a large monitoring mission to the CIS countries, while in the so-called developed democracies a limited number of ODIHR representatives work or no observation is conducted at all.

For comparison, in 2015, more than 450 observers were deployed to Kazakhstan for presidential elections, more than 350 to Kyrgyzstan for parliamentary elections, 340 to Belarus for presidential elections, 180 to Tajikistan for parliamentary elections, and no observers were deployed to Finland for parliamentary elections and Poland for presidential and parliamentary elections.

What one should know about the methodologies of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), they have no general principles of election observation and detection of violations, i.e. there is no general developed and approved concept of approaches. This allows the West to apply it flexibly, mainly in relation to post-Soviet countries, i.e. not to assess objectively, but as the current situation requires. So why do we need observers who are not objective, who come to the elections with a deliberately formulated position - to discredit and drown us?