No referendum polling stations would be set up abroad

February 2, BPN. No polling stations would be set up for the referendum abroad, the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) and the Foreign Ministry said on February 2.

“According to the information received from the MFA, the heads of the Belarusian foreign missions did not decide on establishing polling stations for the national referendum outside the Republic of Belarus due to reasons beyond their control (epidemiological situation and relevant measures and requirements, inability to ensure sufficient level of security when organizing voting as well as a lack of required number of citizens on consular registers),” the CEC said in a statement.

“To date, over a third of our diplomatic missions have not formed polling stations due to the low number of citizens on consular registers,” explained Foreign Ministry spokesperson Anatol Hlaz.

In addition, he remarked that there was not enough staff in Lithuania and Latvia to ensure the operation of the polling stations “due to the actions of our neighbours.” Many embassies and consulates “have decided not to put the health of staff and voters at risk due to the dramatic change in the epidemiological situation in their host countries.” In a number of states, “the rate of clinically confirmed cases of the new coronavirus variant has increased tenfold and severe restrictions on the movement of people between regions have been imposed.”

“During the previous election campaign, members of election commissions and employees of foreign missions were repeatedly threatened, provoked, and subjected to acts of hooliganism and extremism. It would be very naive to believe that the heads of our diplomatic missions would turn a blind eye to the blatant negligence of a number of EU countries towards their responsibilities in ensuring the security of our diplomatic missions. Between August 2020 and December 2021, over 20 acts of aggression were committed against Belarusian diplomats, while the buildings and property of our diplomatic missions were vandalized. Diplomats and Belarusian diplomatic missions in the UK, Poland, France, Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Lithuania were directly attacked. These are all radical manifestations, including causing serious bodily harm, arson, damage to public property and so on,” Hlaz noted.

“Yet most importantly: with few exceptions, the authorities of the host countries have not brought the perpetrators to justice and sometimes they didn’t even look for them. Clearly, this is either an inability or unwillingness on the part of individual EU countries to fulfil their, one might say, sacred obligations. We believe that in the light of this, a number of heads of missions have taken the perfectly logical and justified decision not to set up polling stations due to safety concerns in the host countries,” said Hlaz.

He claimed that “all this does not in any way interfere with the constitutional rights of Belarusian citizens to vote in the forthcoming referendum”. “Traditionally, the share of voters abroad is less than one percent. Those who are temporarily abroad would be able to vote at their place of registration in Belarus, while those who permanently reside abroad and hold a PP-series passport could vote at the polling station where they have their temporary registration or where they have resided most recently in Belarus,” the MFA spokesperson noted.

At the 2020 presidential elections, a number of Belarusian
embassies officially recognized Sviatlana Cichanoŭskaja’s victory.