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The General Secretariat of the OAS, the Government of Haiti and the CEP sign the Agreement on the Expert Missions of the OAS-CARICOM Joint Election Observation

The Agreement between the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS), the Government of the Republic of Haiti and the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) on the expert missions to reinforce the Joint OAS-CARICOM Election Observation Mission was signed on 29 December 2010. This Agreement sets out the terms of reference of the two OAS expert missions requested by President Préval in order to verify the tabulation of the votes and to accompany the claims and challenge phase of the electoral process. The Agreement also sets out the objectives of the missions as well as their access to the required information.

The verification mission will be composed of some ten experts in statistics, elections and information technology. It will evaluate the practices and procedures used during the tabulation of the votes and any other factors affecting and relating to the preliminary results of the presidential elections of 28 November 2010. The evaluation will take into account the Haitian Constitution, the Electoral Law, the OAS Charter, the Inter-American Charter of Democracy as well as the established norms applied by the OAS in its election observation missions. Once the evaluation has been completed, the Mission will provide a report on its conclusions and recommendations to the Government of the Republic of Haiti. The Agreement guarantees the Mission unlimited access to all documents and information, which it requires in order to attain its objectives. All the international experts comprising this Mission will be present in country as of 30 December 2010 and will commence working immediately with the goal of producing their report in good time.

The legal technical assistance mission for the claims and challenge process will provide legal assistance during that phase of the electoral process and will attend the audiences of the National Election Contestation Tribunal (BCEN) with regard to the presidential elections. The Mission will submit its report with conclusions and recommendations to the Government of Haiti. The deployment of the mission will follow the report of the verification mission and will be done in time for the resumption of the audiences and decisions of the Departmental Election Contestation Tribunal (BCED) of the West Department on the complaints linked to the presidential elections and for the start of the work of the BCEN.

The OAS-CARICOM Joint Election Observation Mission is aware of the constraints of time with regard to the electoral process and will do its utmost to carry out its work with care and thoroughness in the shortest period of time possible.

For more information, please visit the OAS Website at www.oas.org.

Reference: E-496/10