Sign the petition to ask Russia to #FreeGrigoryMelkonyants
Today the Presidential Elections are being held in Russia, an electoral process that will not be observed by any international multilateral organization due to the lack of guarantees for it to be a clean and transparent election.
On August 17, 2023, Grigory Melkonyants, co-president of Golos, an organization declared “undesirable” and classified as a “foreign agent” by the Russian government, was arbitrarily detained. This independent electoral monitor based in Russia denounced the numerous irregularities identified during the Municipal and Regional Elections that were held in Russia between September 9th and 11th, 2022, and the arrest occurred less than a month before the electoral farces that Moscow held to appoint regional assemblies and municipal councils in the illegally annexed Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
On October 27, 2022, Mary Lawlor, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights Defenders, issued a joint statement with Clément Nyaletossi Voule, Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association of the UN, regarding the situation of national and international electoral observers as defenders of Human Rights. The declaration set an important precedent in the international recognition of the work of electoral observers who for years have been carrying out increasingly specialized and professional work, aimed at improving the integrity of electoral processes at a global level.
With the arrest of Melkonyants, the importance of having this precedent at the international level to define these actions as violations of Human Rights became clear. Furthermore, it clearly represents the Russian government’s intention to continue organizing electoral farces, without the recognition of the international community or the participation of national, political or civil society actors.
By virtue of all this, and considering that the right of citizens to observe within reasonable limits and under international principles the electoral processes that determine their future, Electoral Transparency, and now the International Consortium of Domestic Electoral Monitors under Authoritarian Regimes, strongly reject the arbitrariness committed against Melkonyants, and call on the international agencies of the United Nations and the international networks of domestic electoral monitors to condemn this attack on the civil and political rights of Russian citizens.
Help us by posting on your social media with hashtag #FreeGrigoryMelkonyants and sharing the link to the petition: https://chng.it/hWcQf2gnTD
