By RIA Novosti,
Baku : Azerbaijan’s Central Election Commission has so far registered 1,104 international monitors to observe the country’s October 15 presidential election, the top election official said Thursday.
The elections will be monitored by observers from 59 countries, including more than 300 from Russia, 50 from the United States, 20 from Britain, 60 from Germany and 40 from France.
“The process has not finished. The accreditation of international observers is continuing,” Mazahir Panakhov said. He added more than 20 foreign media organizations had sent representatives who would also provide an unbiased coverage of the elections.
Azerbaijan’s presidential campaign officially kicked off September 17 and will run until October 14. Seven candidates, including incumbent Ilham Aliyev, have been registered as candidates in the election.
A spokesman for the Central Election Commission announced Thursday that October 15 would be a national holiday.
The main opposition coalition, comprising three main opposition parties – the Popular Front Party, the Musavat Party and the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan – has boycotted the elections.
In September, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) deployed an election observer mission to report on the poll. The mission includes 12 core team members and 28 long-term observers from 23 OSCE participating states.
An interim OSCE/ODIHR report said the “campaign atmosphere” in the country was “calm and quiet, and public interest in the campaign appears limited, apparently due to a perceived lack of genuine competition.”
Aliyev, who took over as Azerbaijan’s president when his father Heydar stepped down in 2003, won 76.84% of the vote in that year’s presidential election.