Home > 2 Organising the elections > ARMENIA- Opinion on the issue of the Immunity of Persons involved in the Electoral Process
 
 
 
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Paragraph 25
 

The electoral commissions must be “impartial bodies”, applying electoral law and the Central Electoral Commission must have “a permanent nature”[13] that is not merely organised for a particular election. This part of the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters ostensibly applies to all democracies. The previous quotation from the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters[14] however makes reference to the existence or otherwise of a “longstanding tradition of administrative authorities' independence from those holding political power.” The truth is that the safeguards needed to ensure the electoral commissions’ impartiality, and indeed authority, will be contingent on the kind of tradition a particular country might have. The electoral administration model of the older established democracies, in which elections are administered by government departments or Ministries of Interior offices composed of a traditionally independent bureaucracy, over which political parties exercise some surveillance through specially appointed representatives, proxies observing the whole electoral process, with electoral disputes being decided upon by the ordinary courts, might not be the most appropriate for many of the new democracies. With the hope that having especially selected and authoritative electoral commissions as independent institutions managing elections might result in free and fair elections, generally accepted as such, many of the newer post-colonial[15] or post-communist[16] democracies charged these commissions with some combination of legislative, administrative, and adjudicative powers which would seem strange in traditional democratic settings.