The delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which will act as an observer at the presidential election of Sunday 2 March, has already arrived in Russia (in fact, the voting process in the far east of the Eurasian country began earlier this week). The 25 delegates of the CoE will be part of a group of approximately 300 international observers who will be seconded to different parts of Russia. The OECD and the European Union instead will not be there: the two institutions thought that their envoys "wouldn’t have sufficiently" protected. The OECD, the most important election supervisory body in the world, had announced the decision not to send a mission, "because of the restrictions laid down by Moscow on the inspection procedures", especially on the number of observers and the timeline. The EU parliament shared the position of the OECD. The Dutch MEP Ria Oomen-Ruijten, head of the EU-Russia inter-parliamentary delegation, explained that "electoral observation is an usual practice which takes place in many countries across the world. It is not about encroaching on national sovereignty or a punishment". The CoE had expressed the same doubts, even if then they decided to send a limited number of delegates.
