The Central Election Commission (CEC) has lodged an appeal against a Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeals ruling obliging the commission to reconsider the registration of official election observers from Georgia.
"Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeals on January 13 issued a ruling obliging the commission to consider the issue. But the legality of the ruling caused justified doubt," CEC member Mykhailo Okhendovsky said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine on Saturday.
"The ruling has not come into force yet, and the CEC filed a respective appeal at the High Administrative Court of Ukraine," he said.
"If we don’t take into account the legal side of the issue, it’s necessary to point to the anomalous number of Georgian official observers that were proposed for registration – over 2,000 people," Okhendovsky said.
He said that all other foreign states had submitted only 276 observers for registration and the CEC had registered all of them. In particular, the commission registered 96 observers from Poland, 73 from the United States, 39 from Russia, 11 from Germany and three from France.
"The real tasks facing those continuing to claim their registration as Georgian observers should undoubtedly become a subject of checks by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Mykhailo Brodsky’s statement could be evidence of attempts by a foreign state to interfere in Ukraine’s domestic affairs," Okhendovsky said.
As reported, candidate for the Ukrainian presidency Mykhailo Brodsky said on January 14 that militants, in the guise of Georgian election observers, were to have arrived in Ukraine to disrupt the January 17 presidential election.
"I, as a candidate for the Ukrainian presidency, have received a report that is evidence of a threat that state figures from another state and international criminal agencies could intervene in the course of the presidential election in Ukraine and disrupt the election. The issue concerns a group of Georgian militants headed by the chairman of the Georgian parliament’s defense and security committee, Givi Targamadze – a personal friend of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili," he said at a press conference on Thursday.
Brodsky played journalists a tape recording of an alleged conversation between a woman, whose voice is similar to that of Tymoshenko, and a man, whose voice is similar to that of Saakashvili.
He said that they spoke about the possible disruption of the election through the involvement of specially trained militants from Georgia who were to have come to Ukraine as international observers.
