Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections

The expert elections*2025 observation mission is organized by the Belarusian Helsinki Committee and the Viasna Human Rights Center as part of the "Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections" campaign. The mission collects and analyzes information about the election campaign based on open sources and messages from voters from Belarus.

CONCLUSIONS

The general conditions and the actual procedure of the formation of territorial election commissions (TECs), which are an important mechanism of the electoral process, demonstrate the state dirigisme of all electoral processes with the imitation of the active participation of civil society, which gives the current executive power full control over the formed commissions.

The formation of territorial election commissions takes place in the conditions when among the two main actors of civil society - political parties and other public associations - there are no organizations that could show independent initiative. The "labor collectives" inherited from the Soviet times are not political subjects, and the electoral processes on their behalf are organized by administrative methods. Citizens, who have the right to participate in the formation of territorial election commissions, are intimidated by the general atmosphere of terror; those who have been active in previous election cycles are subjected to preventive repression.

The possibilities of public control, independent observation of the process of formation of the territorial election commissions are not only reduced to zero, but they are persecuted activity.

In favor of the administrative-command management of the whole process is also the general rush: 1,725 people were allegedly nominated by parties, public associations, labor collectives and citizens in just one week in the number necessary to form virtually all commissions with the maximum number of members.

At the same time, the informing of citizens about the possibility of nomination, as in the previous campaign of 2024, was minimal, which allows us to conclude that the authorities were not interested in the active participation of voters in the formation of territorial election commissions and predetermined decisions on their composition.

Only minimal information is available to the public, both about the opportunities for nomination to the territorial election commissions and about the meetings of the bodies forming the commissions, as well as their results: the process of holding meetings remained non-transparent and non-competitive. The lists of names of members of the commissions have still not been published.

The four largest public associations (BRSM, Belaya Rus, Union of Women, Union of Veterans, Fund for Peace), which have legislatively established special relations with the state since 2023, and the trade unions, which are members of the FPB, remain the main source of the clerks, ensuring the conduct of elections* at the level of territorial election commissions (in addition to four political parties remaining after re-registration, all of which support the course of the current government). The percentage of "acceptability" of candidates from these pro-government parties and public associations imitating civil society, which together make up 63% of the composition of all commissions, tends to 100%.

Thus, given the general atmosphere of intimidation, the lack of effective information and the extremely tight deadlines, it can be said that active citizens did not really have the opportunity to nominate their representatives to the TECs. The goal of the TEC formation phase was rather the opposite: to conduct it as quickly and quietly as possible.