Jill Sherman 16 April 2004

INTERNATIONAL observers from Ukraine, Serbia and Montenegro and Russia will arrive in Britain at the end of April to monitor a British general election for the first time. The ten observers will be sent by the Warsaw-based Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights to assess Britain?s first experience of large-scale postal voting at a general election The ten observers will be sent by the Warsaw-based Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights to assess Britain?s first experience of large-scale postal voting at a general election. Other representatives will come from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Denmark, Canada, the United States and Norway, The Times has learnt. The team will draw up a report for the 55 countries that fund the organisation, which is linked to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

The organisation told The Times that it had accepted the British Government?s invitation to monitor the voting, although a spokeswoman said that details of the assessment were still being worked out with British officials.

The organisation assessed the 2003 local elections in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and has recently sent observers to the elections in Ukraine, which were mired in allegations of vote-rigging and had to be rerun.

The spokeswoman said that they would concentrate on postal voting but would not investigate fraud allegations.

?We don?t investigate, we observe the electorate as a whole. It is not up to us to micro-manage the police,? she said. ?This is of interest to other countries which might conceivably be thinking of postal voting.?