DUSHANBE, March 2, 2015, Asia-Plus — Parliamentary elections in Tajikistan were democratic, transparent and free, the CIS Executive Secretary Sergey Lebedev, who headed the CIS election observation mission for the March 1 parliamentary election in Tajikistan, announced at a news conference in Dushanbe on March 2.
“Our observers have recorded separate violations of the voting procedure, including cases where one person was casting ballots for an entire family, but these cases could not affect the election results,” Lebedev noted.
The election observation mission of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (IPA CIS) also assessed this year’s parliamentary elections in Tajikistan as democratic and free.
The Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, established in March 1995, is a consultative parliamentary wing of the CIS created to discuss problems of parliamentary cooperation. A team of international observers delegated by the IPA CIS is embedded in a larger CIS observation mission to monitor the 2015 parliamentary elections in Tajikistan.
The CIS election monitoring mission is an election monitoring body that was formed in October 2002, following a Commonwealth of Independent States heads of states meeting which adopted the Convention on the Standards of Democratic Elections, Electoral Rights, and Freedoms in the Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The CIS -EMO has been sending election observers to member countries of the CIS since this time; they approved many elections which have been heavily criticized by independent observers.
