Montenbourg wrote:Elections have been a component of decolonization, democratic transitions, and the implementation of peace accords in countries around the globe, and the WA needs to play a major role in providing assistance for these important processes of change.
The WA needs to promote the electoral assistance draws upon the complementary expertise and capacities of many parts of the WA family. The World Assembly needs to provides a wide variety of electoral assistance. In terms of technical support, which is most frequently requested, advice and support may be provided for electoral administration and planning, review of electoral laws and regulations, electoral dispute resolution, boundary delimitation, voter registration, election budgeting, logistics and procurement, use of technology, training, voter and civic education, voting and counting operations and election security.
In addition to requests from Member States, WA electoral assistance would be mandated by a WA governing body such as the Security Council or the General Assembly. This is often the case when peacekeeping or peacebuilding missions are established with electoral components. Even when mandated by such bodies, WA electoral assistance must be approved by the relevant Member State.
The Organisation for Electoral Assistance, referred to in this proposal, was established by
GAR#130. It already provides all this assistance to transitioning nations. Nothing in this proposal would impact on that. However, once a nation begins a transition to democracy, they must comply with any binding WA legislation on the matter. For example, GAR#130 requires a secret ballot and that aggregate results be published. The Disabled Voters Act also has some requirements around access to polling. There have been other proposals in the area which would also have introduced further requirements on all democratic nations, whether transitioning or mature. It is our opinion that such requirements may be onerous on transitioning nations and it is unreasonable to expect them to immediately comply with a potentially large volume of international law on the subject. This is a secondary plank of our argument and we have referred to it in the proposal.
Furthermore, Democracy is built on the very pillar of fairness which gives it clear advantage over alternative forms of government. In democracy, every citizen has a fair chance to come to power. Every individual has one vote and every vote has equal value. The say of a slum dweller in deciding the political future of the country is the same as that of a millionaire industrialist. Free and fair elections are held from time to time under the supervision of an independent body. A true democracy is a platform of healthy competition, not subjected to muscle might or power play.
We fully agree and Bananaistan, like any other mature democracy, can do all this perfectly well by ourselves. However, this proposal would have actually allowed us to call in an international body to supervise and certify our elections if we so wished. At the moment, there is no method open to members of the WA to call in a WA body to do so.
We and all the nations that believe in the work of WA promoting peace and stability are strongly opposed to this proposal for prohibiting World Assembly regulation of elections.
That's all well and good. Bananaistan believes in this also, yet what we primarily object to is the status quo in which every sort of abominable dictatorship has a say in regulating our elections while they themselves do not have to comply. The main reason we brought this proposal before this assembly was to attempt to address this situation.
We are somewhat heartened that the proposal is not being defeated by a huge margin. This suggests to us that there may be a passable resolution on the topic and we will endeavour to continue our work on it. But as we have bemoaned throughout the debate, it is rather a shame that so many delegations have not contributed to the debate. It is difficult to address issues with the proposal of which we have not made aware.