Article 21 of the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights provides the legal and moral justification for
electoral assistance. Since the Declaration’s adoption and proclamation in
1948, the notion of international electoral assistance has undergone various transformations
and been interpreted in various different ways. Nevertheless, it has always
been firmly rooted within the wider domain of “democracy assistance” efforts.
Almost
all established democracies had, by the 1960s, included election assistance in
the framework of their democracy assistance initiatives in favour of developing
countries; as such assistance had been identified as an important stabilising
factor, a facilitator for economic development and a useful foreign policy
instrument. At the same time, election assistance has also been used to justify
interventions and even interference in countries of specific strategic
interest. An early form of electoral assistance was that lent to political
parties in the 1960s and 1970s in many countries of Southern Europe and Latin
America by the US government or by other agencies such as the German or British
political party foundations (see “Aiding
Democracy Abroad, the Learning Curve” Carothers, 1999). Subsequently, established
democracies began providing support for constitutional referenda and
transitional elections through their respective development cooperation
agencies or more often, through specific contributions to multilateral
institutions. Apart from the ‘Balkan Parenthesis’, where for a very specific
set of circumstances the Organisation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was entrusted with the organisation
of elections by the Dayton Peace
Agreement for Bosnia and by the Rambouillet Accords for Kosovo, one can clearly single out three
actors that shaped the way electoral assistance has been justified and
delivered since the 1960s: the United Nations, the United States and, from the
mid-90s, the European Commission.
The
UN’s involvement with electoral activities began in earnest in the 1960s and
1970s,[1] when the Trusteeship Council assisted with
the observation or supervision of some 30 plebiscites, referenda or elections
in various regions of the world. By the
late 1980s, UNDP had financed several small-sized projects that provided some
form of assistance on specific technical aspects of electoral processes and on
the establishment of the related infrastructure necessary to conduct elections.
Also at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the UN had begun to
engage in major electoral missions of three kinds – the organisation and
conduct of elections (such as through the
United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia through UNTAC in 1993); the
supervision and control of elections (such as in Namibia through UNTAG in
1989); and the verification of electoral processes (such as in El Salvador through ONUSAL in 1994).
These
activities, along with rising demand from Member States for technical
assistance by the UN, led to the introduction in December 1991 of a General
Assembly (GA) Resolution 46/137 on
“Enhancing the Effectiveness of the Principle of Periodic and Genuine
Elections”. Since then, the Secretary-General has reported biannually to
the GA on “appropriate ways and means of enhancing the effectiveness of the
principle of periodic and genuine elections, in the context of full respect of
the sovereignty of Member States.” GA
resolution 46/137 also called for
the UN to designate
a senior official to act as a Focal Point for electoral assistance activities
inter alia to ensure consistency in the handling of requests of Member States
organising elections, to assist the Secretary-General to coordinate and
consider requests for electoral verification, and to channel requests for
electoral assistance to the appropriate office or programme.
The
GA resolution also recommended that an office be created to support the Focal
Point in these functions, and since 1992, the United Nations Electoral
Assistance Division (UNEAD) has filled this role. All UN electoral assistance
must follow a request made by a recognised national authority and most assistance delivered in cooperation with national actors in
non-crisis situations has relied heavily on UNDP’s financial and personnel
resources. Also important, however, are the major activities that have been
implemented through the UN
Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in the context of
peacekeeping missions and, increasingly, in an integrated “one UN” manner that
draws on the mandates and expertise of different agencies of the UN family in a
given country.
UNDP’s
field presence and traditional custodianship of the UN Resident Coordinator
system proved important facilitating factors
for the implementation of the UN electoral assistance: UNDP resident
officials provided established relationships with government, bilateral development
agencies, non-governmental organisations and political parties, as well as logistical
infrastructure, country knowledge and financial resources for the mobilisation of
assistance. The support provided from the late 1980s through the late-1990s,
however, did not benefit from long-term planning, but was often directed at
obtaining the maximum results in the shortest possible timeframe.
Similarly,
towards the end of the 1980s the US
started to offer electoral assistance through the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID), the Department of State and the National Endowment for Democracy. This
development occurred after Presidents Carter and Reagan made democracy
promotion a central strategy of the US foreign policy. Initially, the
emphasis of the assistance was heavily placed on election observation missions
and political party support - with a private foundation like The Carter Center specialising
in electoral observation, and institutions such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) more
active in political parties’ development. It was in 1987 that USAID also began
to consider the establishment of a more technical-oriented and professional
NGO, dedicated exclusively to providing assistance to the organisation of the
technical aspects of electoral processes in developing countries. This was when
IFES was established as the
International Foundation for Election Systems (see for a detailed account “Every Vote Counts”, IFES 2007). Since
then, USAID has generally maintained a sort of division between the political
party and civil society organisations (CSOs) development work (generally
entrusted to specialised institutions like NDI and IRI, and the technical
assistance activities in support of electoral processes that are generally entrusted
to IFES. Thanks to a sound and technical-oriented approach to electoral
assistance, IFES has grown in these twenty years to become the most respected
NGO in this field, providing electoral technical assistance across the globe in
a very large range of electoral-related activities and always dedicating
resources for the professionalism and independence of Election Management Bodies
(EMBs).
The EC has been active for a decade an a half in the field of electoral
assistance, and its activities have always been firmly established within the
larger domain of democracy promotion, as set forth in Article
6 of the European Union Treaty. Over this period, the forms through which
this support has been provided have evolved considerably and become much more substantive
then mere financial contributions to projects designed and managed by other
international institutions and agencies. The EC began funding electoral support
missions in 1993 with the observation of the first multi-party elections in Russia, and in 1994 with the first multiracial
elections in South Africa.
In 1994 the EC also provided significant financial and technical support to an
electoral event of specific relevance to its foreign policy - the Legislative
and Presidential Elections in Mozambique,
the first elections in the country after the end of the civil war and the
related Peace Agreement. Since then, EC electoral support activities have grown
considerably in their number and scope:
the Palestine Authority Presidential Elections in 1996 were supported
both in terms of technical assistance and observation. Since then, electoral
assistance projects were mainly supported through the development cooperation
funds, but continued to be programmed on an ad hoc basis without any standardised
and strategic approach for a number of years. In this context, EC Regulation
976 of 1999 and the EC
Communication 191 of April 2000 on “Electoral Assistance and Observation”
marked a significant step towards the conceptualisation of electoral assistance
and observation as complementary activities and towards the harmonisation of
the interventions.
After a period where electoral assistance activities remained somewhat
uncoordinated and not very visible at the global level, the EC is now a leading
global actor in providing electoral support, both in terms of electoral
assistance and electoral observation. The creation of a quality support unit
within the main implementation arm of the EC, Europe Aid, steered the steep
increase of funding designated to electoral assistance operations (from 2004 to
2006, about 320m EUROs), with senior level attention increasingly focused on
the specific challenges of supporting elections in post-conflict scenarios. In
parallel the EU Election Observation programme has built on its initial
achievements and consolidated a reliable methodology that can be applied
consistently anywhere in the world. Since 2000, the EU has deployed some 50 observation
missions in 35 different countries, which have contributed greatly to the
mitigation of conflict and the deterrence of election fraud.
Next: The hard lessons of the 1990s
[1] The
first UN involvement in electoral processes dates back to the end of 1940s with
the observation of the first elections in the Korean peninsula.
