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Issued in Port-au-Prince, 27 May 2001.
A group of 13 election observers has come from Switzerland, France, Germany and the United States. The presence of these observers expresses the interest and the solidarity of the world community of Christian churches for the Haitian people in the important stage of democratic construction this vote represents.
We have admired the manifest will of Haitian citizens to participate in the vote despite the complexity and material and technical difficulties in its organization that rendered almost impossible the strict application of the electoral law. We have also been able to confirm the presence of numerous national observers and representatives of different parties. This engagement has permitted a satisfactory development of the vote in the election bureaus. However, in several voting places we have been witnesses to certain irregularities: pressures, intimidations, secrecy of the vote not guaranteed. The counting of ballots has taken place under particularly difficult conditions (time elapsed, lack of lighting, small quarters, fatigue of the members of the voting offices, departure or exclusion of official observers) and irregularities have been observed, notably in the minutes (incomplete, unsigned or not written on the spot). We did not observe the transfer of results to the communal voting offices (CVO) nor, most of the time, their compilation that has not, generally, been completed within the legal limit of 48 hours. From this point of the compilation of results, our observations were made very difficult by the disorder that reigned in most of the CVOs that we visited. From the day after the vote we have observed, in several places, a degradation of the climate, characterized by rising tensions (arrests of candidates, street demonstrations, acts of violence, interventions by police forces).
Under these conditions, any estimate of the breadth of the consequences of the irregularities observed seems to us premature: a rigorous verification by department and of all the voting places is necessary.
It is the duty of the Provisional Electoral Council, the national authorities, the political parties, civil society, all actors in the electoral process and the representatives of the international community to act, in terms of their respective competences, in order that all the rules of the functioning of democracy be respected.
For the group of ecumenical observers,
Philippe Verseils Aves Mignot Christian Delord
