Milinkevich’s and Kazulin’s HQs to Demand Recognition of Election Results Invalid

The teams of Alexander Milinkevich and Alexander Kazulin are going to send appeals to the Supreme Court demanding to recognize the election invalid. Both candidates plan to file such appeals before March 31.

Mechyslau Hryb, Kazulin’s campaign manager. Told RFE/RL the appeal to the Supreme Court has over 450 pages. This is in a way a monitoring report about violations of the election legislation on all stages of the election: “We describe all violations which were reported, the reaction of the Central Election Commission on all our complaints and proposals, and the facts that we found out through election observation”.
According to Mr. Hryb, it is enough to investigate into the facts of unequal conditions for the candidates, violations during the early voting and vote count, and limitations for the work of observers in order to recognize the election invalid.

Similar appeal has been prepared by the team of Alexander Milinkevich. Uladzimer Labkovich, head of the HQ lawyers’ group, says: “The first part of the appeal is the facts that were happening before the Election Day: violations during creation of the election commissions, limitation of possibilities for campaigning, exclusive promotion of Lukashenka on TV, etc. The second section contains facts of violations during voting (early voting, and voting homes and at polling stations), as well as the process of vote counting. We have registered hundreds of such violations. There are big appendices to the appeal which prove that fraud occurred systematically, all over the country”.

Both Milinkevich’s and Kazulin’s team have no illusion about the fate of their appeals in the Supreme Court. They even doubt the Supreme Court will ever consider the appeals.

Anatol Krasutski, MP, one of the authors of the Election Code, says Belarus election law, unlike the Ukrainian one, does not provide for possibility to cancel the election results altogether. Thus, the Supreme Court can only consider complaints about concrete facts of violations.

Mechyslau Hryb says when the Supreme Court finishes consideration of their appeal Kazulin’s HQ will be turned into Committee for Liberation of the former presidential candidate who is kept in Zhodzina detention center at the moment.