Azerbaijan, Baku 10 January /corr. Trend K.Ramazanova / Ilkka Kanerva, the Foreign Minister of Finland, appeals to all the Governments concerned, to closely co-operate with the ODIHR. "In my view, the election monitoring should be seen as a helpful tool to a host-country, not as a confrontational labeling-machine," Kanerva said on 10 January in his speech at the meeting of the OSCE Permanent Committee.
In 2008, the presidential elections will take place in Azerbaijan and Armenia. On 5 Jan, the early presidential elections took place in Georgia. According to him, Georgia did hold the competitive presidential elections that were in the essence consistent with most of the relevant standards. "At the same time, I urge the Georgian authorities to take fully into account the recommendations of the OSCE observation mission, when preparing for the parliamentary elections," the Minister said.
Mikhail Saakashvili was forced to fix the early presidential elections after the numerous demonstrations of the opposition. According to the early report of the Central Election Commission of Georgia, 1,912,943 or 56.17% of the voters took part in the elections. Mikhail Saakashvili is surely leading in the early presidential elections in Georgia after the counting of the votes, from the votes of 3 484 out of 3512 the polling stations.