The role of Cambodia’s three independent election monitoring groups will be a sham if the commune election legislation remains unchanged, the three groups wrote in a letter to the UN’s human rights envoy Peter Leuprecht.
The groups said with the current situation, they will not participate in the commune elections because they don’t see how they can contribute in the monitoring process.
Cambodia’s election watchdogs are the Coalition for Free and Fair Elections, the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia and the Neutral and Impartial Committee for Free Elections in Cambodia.
“We want to participate in the monitoring process,” said Chea Vannath, president of Coffel. “But right now, we don’t have the means or the strategy to do our job properly.”
The delayed commune elections, the first in Cambodia, are now tentatively scheduled to take place in early 2002.
Donors and NGOs have been pushing the elections as part of the government’s decentralization program.
But the commune election law undermines “the independence of the election monitoring groups,” the organizations wrote in a letter dated Saturday, when the groups met with Leuprecht during his weeklong visit.
“The law suffers from the incurable defect of charging one body, the National Election Commission, with the inherently incompatible roles of both organizing and monitoring an election.”
The monitoring groups also criticized the commune administration law, which requires commune clerks to be appointed by the Ministry of Interior. The groups say appointments make the clerk open to political influence from the central government.
Co-Minister of Interior You Hockry, whose ministry wrote the commune election laws, said it would be difficult to change the laws now because they’ve already been approved by lawmakers and are currently in the hands of the Constitutional Council.
“The law is good enough already,” You Hockry said. “The meaning of this law doesn’t undermine the independence of election groups.”
He also said if the monitoring groups have a problem with the commune clerk positions, they should send their own candidates to apply for the positions. The deadline to sign up for the clerk examination is March 7.
If the Constitutional Council approves the law soon, the Ministry of Interior will announce the exact dates of the elections, most likely in January 2002.
