Although I am an American, I do not represent the US Government or necessarily share its views. The issue of Shannon and rendition is really a bilateral matter between Ireland and the United States. We had a special representative on Guantanamo because a number of parliamentarians thought it was an issue we should address. The president of the assembly appointed the president of the Belgian Senate, Anne-Marie Lizin, as a special representative. She went to the United States several times and visited Guantanamo three times. I was there with her on the last visit and she has issued several reports about her conclusions which can be found on our website. The Parliamentary Assembly passed a resolution at its most recent session condemning rendition. The American delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, consisting of both Republicans and Democrats from the House and Senate, were unanimously critical of Guantanamo and called for its closure as soon as possible.
We have a special envoy on Georgia, our former president who was there a few weeks ago. Two weeks ago he was in America talking to people there and today he is at a meeting in the Russian Foreign Ministry to try to get everyone's point of view on what happened and what may happen in the future. The Russians have apparently pulled troops out of the buffer zone adjacent to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which will be monitored by the European Union. The OSCE has no particular role in that area at the moment but we have 20 monitors in the buffer zone and eight OSCE employees in the sub-mission in Tskinvali, five of whom are locals. They are very restricted in where they can go, what they can do and the people to whom they can speak. The mission's mandate will run out at the end of December and it requires unanimous consent in the OSCE for it to be continued. That means the Russians would have to agree. They have not agreed to our reinforcing that mission by adding personnel to it.
The reports we are receiving are not very comprehensive or satisfactory. There are 130,000 refugees in Georgia from the affected areas in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and the buffer zone. Our special envoy and some of my staff have visited those refugees. It is a great human tragedy and a very difficult situation for Georgia. As to who was responsible for what, many people are looking at this from various angles, including the Georgian parliament. One of these days we will find out what really happened and why, who pulled trigger and who was responsible for what. We met the president of the assembly and three weeks ago I met the Russian Foreign Minister in Moscow and listened to his point of view on this subject, blaming Saakashvili's impetuosity for triggering this violence. At our annual Fall meeting in Toronto two weeks ago we had a special debate on Georgia with the Georgian Foreign Minister and the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, who led a debate, along with our special envoy, on the situation in Georgia. The debate continued for four and a half hours with parliamentarians from more than 40 countries participating.
One of the things the Parliamentary Assembly does is promote interparliamentary dialogue. We do not pass laws that are binding on anybody. The chairmanship of the OSCE which is representative of the governmental side is now with the Finnish Foreign Minister, Alexander Stubb. Although we interact and work very closely with the Finns, they are not obligated to do anything we say, although they are very co-operative. Many of our resolutions are directed towards the chairmanship, towards the permanent council and other institutions in the OSCE. They are advisory recommendations; they are not binding in any way. To that extent we cannot do very much.
The OSCE has a series of mechanisms to deal with early warning. The High Commissioner on National Minorities, Knut Vollebaek, the former foreign minister of Norway, travels very quietly in the various areas where there are minorities who are experiencing difficulties. He is engaged in mediating, conciliating and reporting on these situations. It was obvious to everybody in the OSCE hierarchy that Georgia was in a very precarious position and that threats had been made by Russia ever since the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state. As to what the implications might be for South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transdniester and other areas, there was verbal sparring between Saakashvili and the Russian leadership which had been going on for many months. There were incidents in the border area between South Ossetia and Georgia where there were outbreaks of gunfire and violence from time to time. It was not surprising, once there was high level engagement, that there would be a full-scale engagement that would result in the use of overwhelming force by Russia. There was no doubt what the outcome would be. The question now is why this happened and who started it. That is something we will learn one of these days.
We monitored the US elections in 2004. One of the great things about monitoring elections in the west is that you can read in the newspapers or on the Internet about almost everything that happens. It is not as though somebody is stealing votes in the back room and nobody knows about it. The main shortcomings in the American elections in 2004 and in 2000, 2002 and 2006 related to election day and the counting. On election day there were efforts to intimidate voters, particularly in minority areas, to prevent them from voting. In Ohio it turned out that the Secretary of State, who was a Republican, did not allocate enough voting machines in the heavily Democratic and black areas of Cleveland, and there were lines of people waiting to vote until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. Many people did not wait that long and left. We were very critical of these things. We have also been looking very closely at the use of electronic voting, particularly where there is no paper trail. In Tampa, Florida in 2006 we monitored this, but we were well aware that there was a congressional race in which 25,000 fewer votes were cast than in all the other races on the ballot. Nobody can explain this because there was no paper trail for the voting machines.
In monitoring the American elections this time, we began in August contacting the various agencies at state and Federal level as to how we could receive information and access for monitoring. We have a body known as the Election Assistance Commission, created by the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress after the 2000 election when we had the famous "hanging chads" in Florida. The Election Assistance Commission briefed 60 of our parliamentarians in Washington two weeks ago and my staff is working with them in the states where our people are deployed to meet with those responsible for trying to improve the voting system, whether it be electronic or otherwise. We will have an opportunity to judge not only what was recommended but how these recommendations are being carried out. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems is going to do a full briefing on the various kinds of voting machines, the different electronic and paper machines. Between 150 and 200 parliamentarians will be thoroughly briefed in Washington on these procedures. We were there two weeks ago for the briefings from the majority leader of the House, Steny Hoyer, and the minority whip, Roy Blunt, Democrat and Republican. We heard from the two senior representatives, the executive director of the Democratic National Committee and the political director of the Republican National Committee, from various journalists and pundits gave their view on the election and where they saw the problems.
Deputy Higgins referred to negative campaigning. This is a factor which has increasingly plagued US elections in the past 20 or 30 years, particularly with the advent of television advertising and 30-second advertisements which lend themselves to this kind of negative suggestive content. The polls show that the American public are fed up with this. Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain's advisers who is famous for these campaigns, when criticised after an election claimed he had never heard anyone say that negative campaigning did not work. I think it probably does, but it is a terrible thing. I do not think anyone else has a system like ours that allows this sort of thing to the degree to which it is practised in the United States.
All the 55 states in the OSCE are committed to democracy and are all supposed to be democracies to one degree, but no two electoral system are exactly alike. Each parliamentary system is somewhat different from another. Some have two houses of parliament, others have one; some have proportional representation, some do not; some have high thresholds, some have low thresholds; some have the "first past the post" systems, others have a pure list system. It ranges across the whole spectrum. In a democracy it is normally the parliament or the people who decide what kind of system they want. If they are happy with that system and people are able to express their opinion and their will is expressed and respected in the elections, then it is not up to us to say it is good or bad.
We find in many of these places efforts by the government or by one side or the other to use power to disadvantage the opposing side to the extent that they are not allowed to vote, to participate or to campaign. In Russia we monitored the elections in 2003. The ODHIR did not go, but we monitored the elections very thoroughly. We had people all over the country from Vladivostock to St. Petersburg and our judgment is that it was not a fair election because the government had merged itself with United Russia. Putin, even though he was not a member of the party, in effect asked people to vote for him, his government, his policies and for United Russia. This virtually eliminated what would be called the liberal opposition so that it ended up with only Zhirinovsky's party, the Communist Party and the party of Putin. We have seen in Kazakhstan, in Kyrgyzstan and most likely in Belarus two weeks ago that their use of the pure list system has resulted in one party parliaments, where nobody in the opposition gets in. We have constantly cautioned that if they do not have legitimate opposition, they do not have democracy.
Parliamentarians, more than anyone else, bring to election monitoring visibility and credibility. As elected politicians they are practitioners of the art and they understand what elections are about. They can determine rather quickly whether something is wrong and whether it is fair. They give visibility to the OSCE'S effort in this field because the media in their own countries follow what they have to say. Because they are known figures as politicians, the media will ask their opinion about a given election. That credibility is very valuable in making the OSCE the leading election observation organisation, certainly in the OSCE world. It is a valuable asset for the organisation. When these elections are monitored, parliaments take to heart what their peers say. A parliamentarian, even if elected in a one-party system, wants to be respected as a member of parliament and wants his colleagues from other countries to afford him that respect. On a number of occasions when we have criticised elections, the leaders of the parliament, the government or the election commission have asked what they can do to improve election law. The Parliamentary Assembly and the OSCE through its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights has undertaken that effort and it has been very helpful in a number of cases.
Regarding the mechanisms we employ, parliamentarians cannot spend six weeks in a particular place, but the long-term observers supplied by ODIHR who might be civil servants, retired diplomats, party operatives or academics go to these countries and prepare the ground for the parliamentarians, who are also briefed in advance by us and by their governments. In almost all these countries there are diplomatic establishments and ambassadors who also brief the parliamentarians. They receive periodic updates on developments.
In the American elections we started by contacting the political organisations, the parties, the campaigns, the Federal Election Commission, the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights and others who monitor election procedures. Then we had a two-day briefing in Washington. One of our vice presidents is to visit six states this week with some of our staff to lay the groundwork for the deployment of our monitors in late October. We will have two full days of briefings in Washington by everybody you would want to hear from if you were interested in the conduct of the election. Two days after the election we will hold a press conference to give an opinion. The visibility and credibility of parliamentarians from 40 or so European states and Canada will give credence to the OSCE election observation activities.
I do not want to comment on Shell Oil. That is not an OSCE issue.
We have a special representative for gender issues who follows what goes on in the OSCE institutions in terms of gender balance in staff and employment practices. Gender balance is one of the main objectives of the OSCE. The governmental structure of the OSCE has improved considerably because of this constant reminder by our gender representative, who gives three reports a year and visits the various institutions. I am proud to say that the OSCE'S parliamentary assembly's staff gender balance has been almost 50:50 for about ten years. We are quite pleased with our performance in that regard. As a result of our efforts, a gender adviser has been put into the hierarchy of the OSCE in the Secretary General's office, who monitors this matter on a full-time basis. Each of the 19 OSCE field missions, in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia has an officer responsible for gender issues. We have been quite successful in sensitising the OSCE and a number of participating states to the need for improvement in gender equality.
If I did not answer any questions, I will be happy to respond further.
