UN will send experts to presidential elections in Venezuela, report will be confidential

The Secretariat of the United Nations (UN) confirmed this Tuesday that it will deploy a Panel of Electoral Experts for the presidential elections on July 28 in Venezuela, but the final report will be confidential.

“A team of four experts will be deployed to the country in early July to provide the Secretary-General with an independent and internal report on the general development of the elections,” said a statement from the office of Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN Secretary-General. , Antonio Guterres.

He added that “the panel’s report to the secretary will be confidential and will include recommendations on improvements that could be made in future electoral processes in Venezuela.”

In March, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) announced that it had sent invitations to international observation missions for the July presidential elections, including to the UN Panel of Experts.

An expert panel is one of the “various” types of electoral assistance that the UN can provide at the request of Member States.

“Unlike UN electoral observation missions, which require a specific mandate from the Security Council or the General Assembly, and are very rare, Electoral Expert Panels do not issue public statements evaluating the overall conduct of a process. election or its results,” Dujarric’s statement clarifies.

“Without a legislative mandate, the UN cannot publicly observe or evaluate the electoral processes of a Member State, and therefore, the Panel of Experts will not issue any public statements,” the text continues.

Last week, the Carter Center reported that will deploy an electoral mission which will be “limited in scope” and will not conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the voting, counting and tabulation processes.

Last month, the Venezuelan electoral body revoked and left without effect the invitation to the Electoral Observation Mission (EU EOM) of the European Union, after, in the framework of efforts to achieve competitive elections, the EU extended “for a shorter period” the sanctions against Venezuela and temporarily lifted some that They weighed against some officials, including the president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso.

The electoral body ratified, however, the call for a “broad oversight” of the Community of States and Caribbeans (CELAC), the Caribbean Community (Caricom), the Inter-American Union of Electoral Organizations (Uniorec), the Panel of Experts of the United Nations, the African Union, the Carter Center, the Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America, among others.

The Brazilian government, considered an ally of President Nicolás Maduro, has ratified the importance of the presidential elections in Venezuela having a “broad presence of international observers”, in accordance with the agreements on electoral guarantees signed in Barbados.

In 2021, an EU EOM visited Venezuela to observe the regional and municipal elections on November 21, in which part of the opposition refused to participate, considering them a “farce.” Maduro attacked the members of the mission and called them “enemies” and “spies.”

In its final report, the EOM, among other things, observed “structural deficiencies” such as the “lack of legal certainty,” as well as the lack of judicial independence and disrespect for the rule of law that “compromise equality of conditions and impartiality and transparency of elections.”

In addition, it made several recommendations, including strengthening the separation of powers and “suppressing the prerogative” of the Comptroller General of the Republic (CGR) to strip citizens of their fundamental right to stand for election.

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