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August 5 polls: No international observers due to logistical issues
View(s):Despite the Election Commission (EC) having invited them, the Parliamentary election next week will be the first major national poll in recent years to be held without international observers.
EC Chairman Mahinda Deshapriya requested the Foreign Relations Ministry as recently as last month to facilitate the arrival of observer missions from the European Union (EU) and some Asian groups, authoritative sources said. However, the required logistics–particularly the quarantine requests of the observers–were not in tandem with Government policy.
In addition to it being difficult to arrange flights with the airport still closed, the EU observers had wanted to quarantine at the Colombo Hilton after arriving with a negative PCR test but were told it was not a designated hotel.
“There was no effort to practically address the logistical issues related to flights and quarantine,” an official Sri Lankan source said. “The EU group didn’t want to stay in any quarantine centre meant for normal arrivals, so they weren’t limiting themselves to the Hilton. We could have offered another exclusive hotel as the EU bears the full cost of the observers.”
A foreign observation report would only have helped the Government, he continued, pointing to the mission statements after the November 2019 presidential election which concluded that the poll had been free and fair.
It was not possible to facilitate the missions because of logistics, an EC spokesman said. “Don’t you know the airport is closed?” he asked. “How can we bring them in such a situation? We did invite them but they will not be coming now.”
Meanwhile, an EU spokesperson said they were invited and had even prepared to observe the upcoming legislative elections, as the EU did for the presidential election in 2019.
“However, the prevalent sanitary conditions and their impact made the deployment of a fully-fledged mission not feasible,” he said. “More specifically, travel restrictions and existing quarantine arrangements in place in Sri Lanka would not have allowed the EU to proceed to a deployment of full (European observer Mission) EOM (of around a 100 experts) complying with our duty of care for EU election observation experts.”