The Election Network in the Arab Region [ENAR] Held the third meeting of its Board of Directors
As part of the celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Election Network in the Arab Region [ENAR] held a meeting for its Board of Directors in Amman on Saturday, 6 December 2008, in the presence of a number of the members of the Board of Directors representing Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, and Kuwait. The participants approved the minutes of the second meeting of the Board of Directors held in Doha in May 2007.
The participants discussed the report on the activities of the ENAR since the constituent conference held in 2006 to date.
The participants in the meeting also approved the broad- lines of the working plan of the ENAR for 2009, particularly in the field of monitoring presidential and parliamentary elections in each of Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq and Algeria.
The participants in the meeting decided to approve in principle the applications for joining ENAR membership submitted by several Arab organizations operating in the field of elections. These organizations were from Morocco, Egypt and Palestine. The participants in the meeting also decided to hold the general assembly meeting of ENAR in Amman in July 2009.
President of the ENAR, Dr Nizam Assaf, said that preparations for the establishment of the ENAR by the Amman Center for Human Rights Studies [ACHRS] took one full year before the convening of the ENARA constituent conference in Amman in 2006. He added that ENAR has more than 50 non-government member organizations with programs that deal with the various aspects of elections.
These organizations represent 15 Arab countries. Moreover, ENAR has an electronic observatory that has been publishing a monthly report on elections in the Arab World for the last two and a half years. Ever since its establishment, ENAR has trained domestic observers and monitors parliamentary and presidential elections in each of Mauritania, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait and Syria.
