Rs. 185 m for Police polls duty

by Manjula Fernando

The Elections Secretariat has provided Rs. 185 million to the Police Department for elections duty including the provision of security to international observers, a senior Elections official told the Daily News yesterday.

The Elections Commissioner has instructed Police to provide security for international observers arriving here shortly for monitoring work at the Presidential Election, he said.

In addition, the Elections Secretariat will spend around Rs. 10 million on logistical and other facilities for the foreign observers from the Asian region."Observers from the Association of Asian Elections Authorities (AAEA) have requested us to fund their mission and we need to look after their expenses while they are here," the sources said.

He said the AAEA, an independent regional polls monitoring body, has already confirmed a 27 member team for the poll. But the European Union and the Commonwealth Secretariat are yet to convey details of their teams.

The funds will cover travelling, accommodation and internal transport for the Asian monitors while the other two, the European Union and the Commonwealth Secretariat as usual will arrange logistics through their Colombo offices, he said.

"We are yet to finalise estimates for the expenses as details such as the Asian monitors' countries is yet to be informed."

Two officials from the European Commission in Brussels were here recently for a needs assessment and report if observers should be sent for polls monitoring.

The Desk Officer for Sri Lanka in the EC, Brussels Gilles Bertand and the Resende, EC Michael Meyer was in Colombo to conduct this assessment. The EU deployed the biggest team of 65 monitors during the General Election last year.

They covered the pre-election and post-election periods as well as the election day. A comprehensive report based on their observations were handed over to the elections commissioner where they highlighted gross polls violations by the LTTE in the North-East.