Olha Aivazovska elected as GNDEM Board Chair

Civil Network OPORA's Political Programs Coordinator Olha Aivazovska has been elected as Board Chair at the Global Network of Domestic Election Monitors (GNDEM)

The GNDEM Coordinating Committee took the corresponding decision unanimously on 18 December.

For the last term, she was Chair of GNDEM’s Best Practices Working Group. She is also Co-Chair of the ad hoc Joint Working Group on Cooperation between Citizen and International Election Observers that was created in 2020 between GNDEM and the Coordinating Committee of the Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation (DoP) implementation process with the participation of the Open Society Foundation.

The Global Network of National Election Observers currently consists of 251 member organizations in 89 countries and 9 regional members in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and in the Middle East and North Africa. Organizations are building this global network to conduct non-partisan citizen election monitoring to ensure a fair election process, increase the accountability of governments and political parties, reduce the potential for political violence, and strengthen citizen rights to participate in state governance.

Member organizations recognize that rights are inseparable from responsibilities, and non-partisan election monitoring includes moral commitments to the public, including potential candidates, officials at election commissions, and all those involved in the administration of genuinely democratic elections.

These moral commitments include adherence to the highest criteria of objectivity and accuracy and using methodologies based on international best practices with consideration of the county's peculiarities. They also include cooperation with all electoral subjects, and, at the same time, non-interference in the election and refusal from any attempts to hinder them. Rights, commitments, and moral obligations of civil election observers are regulated by the following documents: Declaration of Global Principles for Nonpartisan Election Observation and Monitoring by Citizen Organizations and the Code of Conduct for Non-Partisan Election Observers.