Reports

This report is published at a time of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It underscores the central role of freedom of expression in the maintenance of democracy at home, as well as international order and security abroad. This report provides the analysis and conclusions on the state of freedom of expression and the work of the media in seven countries of the EU Eastern Neighborhood, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia.

In recent years, election experts observed significant increase of spending on election campaigns. The transparency of party and campaign financing became one of the key requirements to ensure the integrity of today's election processes. To raise awareness about the urgent need to increase transparency, our newest comparative study analyzes the regulation and oversight of political party and campaign financing in the EU - Eastern Partnership and Russian Federation.

The Committee of Voters of Ukraine reports that the most serious problem by the end of voting yesterday was voter bribery. Bribing of voters to change their address to vote in a specific constituency was also reported, as well as instances of bussing voters to constituencies. The second major problem of Election Day were instances of falsifying the vote, including instances where voters were forced to vote, ballots went missing, or ballot papers having already been filled in before being issued to voters.

OPORA announced in its press conference on the eve of local elections that despite unequal distribution of anti-COVID provisions to polling stations and election commissions, there is still time for local authorities to fully comply with the standards set to counteract COVID19 during the elections. The last few days before the election was accompanied by typical abuses and violations, and incidents of foreign interference were investigated by OPORA and other experts.

Continuous amendments to the Election Code during an ongoing election go against Venice Commission recommendations and cause legal uncertainty for the local elections in Ukraine. Illegal campaigning was recorded as the most common electoral misconduct in the past month and unclear explanations by the Central Election Commission on new procedures may cause confusion and threaten the election result. More on this in OPORA's second interim monitoring report of the local elections. 

Opora issued their first interim report of the pre-election campaign period for the local elections. Officially, election campaigning began 05 September, however, political parties, their local organizations, and potential candidates de facto already launched their active campaigning in August. This stage of early campaigning is unregulated by any electoral legal framework and there are no controls over campaign spending. The uncontrolled spending on political ads on social media is also a concern highlighted in the report available on OPORA's website here.