A small group of international observers have given mostly positive assessments to the Sunday elections to the Yerevan City Council, saying they have mainly corresponded to European standards.

Fifteen observers from the Council of Europe (CoE) Congress of Local and Regional Authorities who monitored the vote on May 31 said: “There were shortcomings, which probably affected the results, but not the legitimacy of the elections.”

“This was a step forward as compared to the local elections held in 2008,” the international observers said in their preliminary report.

Head of the delegation Nigel Mermagen from the United Kingdom said the group of observers had managed to visit between 200 and 230 polling stations, staying there from five minutes to two hours.

“We, of course, take into consideration the fact that illegal actions could have been stopped in our presence. But whenever it was possible, we returned to the polling stations from where we had received alerts. This is the best we could do given our scarce resources,” Mermagen told ArmeniaNow.

The preliminary report does not have any data about violations. According to Mermagen, it is still too early to talk about details, and as for the final report, the observers are planning to submit it in October, on the eve of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) plenary session.

The nine members of the observation mission as well as the three European Union representatives arrived in Yerevan on May 27 to observe pre-election processes. Mermagen says they received quite a number of alerts during that period of observations.

“We had a number of concerns in the pre-election period, some of which were dispelled during the meetings; some of them were confirmed, and they will later be included in our final report,” Mermagen said.