make preferableYEREVAN. – Schools and educational institutions should be free from any electoral campaigns, EU Ambassador to Armenia Piotr Switalski told reporters on Friday.
Speaking about the incidents that were registered during the campaign, Ambassador said they collect all this signals, and the OSCE/ODIHR observes are attentively following the incidents.
His comments came in response to a question about the recent interview of Daniel Ioannisyan, Coordinator of the Union of Informed Citizens NGO, where he said his organization had recorded a number of cases of misusing administrative resources. In particular, over 100 schools and kindergartens formed lists of voters that claim to support the ruling party.
“It is responsibility of observes to examine signals, and they do their best, we will wait for their evaluation,” he said. “One should be clear, schools and educational institutions should be free from any electoral campaigns. This is a general rule in the democratic countries.”
It is very important that education ministry and the local administration, including Yerevan city council, take every action to prevent any possible misuse of schools for purposes of electoral campaign, the diplomat believes.
The European Union has a clear interest that the schools remain clean, because they are now preparing a multimillion support project in the field of education working with secondary schools.
“For us it is very important that schools are politically neutral. We have a project amounting to 10 million euros to upgrade the quality of Armenian schools,” Switalski said.
