Venice Commission - Elections, Referendums and Political Parties

Elections, Referendums and Political Parties

The Council for Democratic Elections (CDE) is made up of representatives of the Venice Commission, the Parliamentary Assembly and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe. The aim of the Council for Democratic Elections is to ensure co-operation in the electoral field between the Venice Commission as a legal body and the Parliamentary Assembly and the Congress of the Council of Europe as political bodies in charge of election observation, in order to promote the European common values in this field – the principles of the European electoral heritage.

The Commission identifies and develops standards in the area of elections through:

  • Codes of good practice on elections, on referendums and on political parties
  • Opinions - mostly joint ones with OSCE/ODIHR - on electoral legislation
  • Workshops for Central Election Commissions (CEC) and Courts
  • Assistance missions to CECs and legal advice to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE)
  • “Vota” database of electoral legislation

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