Rights groups in Egypt question fairness of upcoming election News
Rights groups in Egypt question fairness of upcoming election

[JURIST] The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) [advocacy website], Egypt's leading non-governmental rights group, has said that it does not believe the upcoming presidential elections will be fair due to the lack of neutral election monitors. EOHR and other rights groups are concerned about the composition of the election oversight committee, the committee's decision to bar access to the polling station for independent observers, and the refusal of international supervision [JURIST report]. President Hosni Mubarak [Wikipedia profile] is largely expected to win the elections, which are the first multi-candidate elections [JURIST report] in Egypt's history. Despite the election committee's rules, EOHR has trained nearly 600 election monitors [EOHR press release] and plans to train more to monitor outside the polling stations and to catch possible abuses there. Reuters has more. Egypt Guide has local coverage.