Inviting of OSCE to control the elections and what should actually be requested from them

News about President of working group for cooperation with OSCE Nebojša Stefanović, inviting  for monitoring of upcoming elections in Serbia, and "asked for a meeting in which all details of future cooperation would be discussed", doesn’t say yet anything about whether the Government of Serbia has the intention to ask the monitoring mission to do more than usual so far. 

Namely, it could happen that role of this international organization could be similar to that from the previous election processes. That means that certain number of observers monitored the election process, so that experts from ODIHR, on the basis of insight into documents and conversations with participants of the elections, representatives of state organs and other observers came to the conclusions about harmonization with international standards so that their preliminary reportis published just after, and final with complete recommendations after several months. Serbia, however in this point is in no need of anything else.

ODIHRmade numerous recommendations for resolving of problems after parliamentary elections in 2016 and presidential electionsin 2017. European Commission each year ascertains that Serbia hasn’t proceeded by these recommendations, whereas it is clear that they are important for meeting the standards of the EU. Resolving of these problems requested serious thinking, committed work, but above all preparedness of the authorities to admit existence of problems. These recommendations were treated at the best selectively – while certain activities related to lists of voters were implemented, there even was no announcement of state organs improving anything related to financing of the election campaign, control of that process or preventing of abuse of public function for party promotion.

Numerous recommendations of CSOs, related to ODIHR recommendations, including Transparency Serbia’s, were presented during the dialogue about elections. These recommendations correspond to certain proposals and requests of the opposition parties, conditioning their participation at the elections with their fulfillment. Therefore it would be the best for Serbia that the authority representatives declare on what will be accepted and ask the ODIHR to evaluate in which level such changes met their recommendations