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European Stability Initiative think tank, which had previously published two reports exposing the bias of international observers regarding democracy and human rights assessment in Azerbaijan, has issued a new report on the latest presidential elections in Azerbaijan titled DISGRACED: AZERBAIJAN AND THE END OF ELECTION MONITORING AS WE KNOW IT

The report brings up the question of controversial assessments given by 50 election monitoring organizations, 49 out of which gave a positive assessment to the elections, terming them as “free and fair”, while only one organization – OSCE/ODIHR harshly criticized it bringing up cases of “systemic fraud”. The authors of the report question the methodology employed by international election monitoring groups in general, calling for the review of these mechanisms. The report also raises the question as to what the election observers who gave positive assessments were motivated by. By examining these persons’ prior activities the report reveals that many of them either had connections with Azerbaijani elite and Azerbaijani lobbying organizations or had some other vested interest in “whitewashing” the fraudulent elections in Azerbaijan.
Below are extracts from the summary of the report.

“Forty-nine monitoring groups praised the elections as free and fair, meeting European standards. One group of international election monitors refused to go along with the praise: the election monitoring mission of ODIHR, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.

Only ODIHR employed a core team of experts and long-term observers, who arrived in the country many weeks before the day of elections. In addition ODIHR mobilized a large number of short-term observers for the elections themselves. ODIHR monitors observed voting in 1,151 of the 5,273 polling stations across the country. The evidence of systemic fraud was overwhelming. ODIHR also observed 105 vote counts out of 125 constituency election commissions. While voting was problematic, the counting of ballots was catastrophic, with 58 per cent of observed polling stations assessed as bad or very bad. It may have been the worst vote count ever observed by an ODIHR election observation mission anywhere.

The events in October 2013 in Baku reveal a broken system for international election observation.

This report argues that the future of election monitoring on the European continent depends on how decision makers – in the European Parliament, in the Council of Europe, in the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and in European governments – react now. It is vital to revisit the facts and analyses behind the different assessments, and to retrace how different groups of observers could arrive at radically diverging conclusions. The relationship between long- and short-term election observers needs to be rethought.

Aliyev’s victory and its scandalous endorsement by most international monitors offer an opportunity to fix a broken system. Doing so would benefit not just Azerbaijanis, but all those who believe that democratic elections are celebrations of basic human rights, in Europe and around the world.”