MOSCOW, March 20. /TASS/. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has discredited itself as an institution for monitoring elections, while its Office for Democratic Institutes and Human Rights (ODIHR) is biased in its opinions, Federation Council (upper house of parliament, or "senate") Deputy Speaker Konstantin Kosachev said at a meeting of the Federation Council.
The senior Russian senator commented on a recent remark by UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron, who claimed that last weekend’s election in Russia was uncompetitive. Cameron condemned what he called "electoral violations," saying that OSCE international observers were not invited.
"The OSCE has completely discredited itself as an election observer," Kosachev said. According to him, ODIHR has been using the playbook written by the National Democratic Institute, a US non-profit organization, even though that manual has never been discussed or approved by anyone at the OSCE.
Also, Kosachev argued, twenty out of 57 OSCE participating countries have never been monitored by either ODIHR or any other agencies within the regional organization, clearly for politically motivated reasons.
Apart from the United Kingdom, where the monarch is not elected, and members of the House of Lords "mostly sit there by inherited right" <…> "the only other such country in the world where parliamentary mandates are inherited is the Kingdom of Lesotho," the senator said. "It is impossible to imagine a system that has drifted farther from democracy," he concluded.
Russia held its first-ever three-day presidential election on March 15-17, in which around one-third of the country’s regions offered voters the option of voting online. According to data from the Central Election Commission (CEC), incumbent Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ran as an independent, self-nominated candidate, garnered 87.28% of the vote, with 100% of the ballots counted. Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) nominee Nikolay Kharitonov scored 4.31%, followed by New People party nominee Vladislav Davankov with 3.85% of the vote and Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) nominee Leonid Slutsky at 3.2%.