PRESS RELEASE
TO: ALL MEDIA HOUSES
DATE 14TH NOVEMBER 2024.
ELECTORAL COMMISSION DENYING SOME CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANISATIONS ACCREDITATION IS A DEPARTURE FROM THE NORM SINCE 1992.
- The Electoral Commission(EC) of Ghana’s decision to deny Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) including the African Electoral Institute ( AEI) accreditation to monitor the 2024 general elections without stated reasons is a departure from the norm since 1992.
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This move undermines the transparency and integrity of the electoral process, potentially jeopardizing the credibility of the elections.
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CSOs have played a vital role in promoting transparency, accountability, and civic engagement in Ghana’s elections. By denying them accreditation, the Electoral Commission risks diminishing the trust and confidence of stakeholders, including voters, political parties, and international observers.
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The key concerns for the denial of accreditation to the CSOs are:
i. Undermining Transparency, thus CSOs provide critical oversight, ensuring that electoral processes are fair and transparent. Without their involvement, the risk of irregularities and disputes increases, hence the need for as many as possible CSOs to be accredited and monitoring the 2024 elections.
ii. Also, accredited CSOs help hold the Electoral Commission and political actors accountable for their actions via the candid reports they issue. The denial of accreditation for some of the CSOs will create an accountability vacuum .
iii. The denial of accreditation to these many CSOs will threaten the credibility of the 2024 elections especially in the eyes of the international community, who will view the elections as less credible without CSO monitoring, hence potentially leading to diminished legitimacy and global confidence in Ghana’s democratic process .
African Electoral Institute therefore urge the Electoral Commission to reconsider its decision, by giving accreditation to the CSOs that have been rejected accreditation to help ensure that these CSOs fulfil their essential role as observers, adding to the eyes on the field to augment a credible election.
END:
SIGNED
Joshua Adjin-Tettey
Director of Communications and External Relations
About Us:
African Electoral Institute ( AEI) is a Civil Society Organisation (CSO) founded to deliver sustainable electoral solutions to Emerging and Developed Democracies to strengthen, augment, and build electoral stakeholders capacity and participation on electoral issues through electoral education on voter’s rights and freedom, electoral research, election monitoring, election observation, election results collation, election security awareness and training of polling agents and elections directors underscoring the fact that “elections are won at the polling stations’’ and the participation of all identifiable electoral stakeholders in an electoral process such as Political Parties, Governmental Institutions, underpinning transparency and accountability for a free, fair, and credible elections in Africa and the wider world.
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