Staff Reporter:
United Nations Resident Coordinator (UNRC) in Bangladesh Gwyn Lewis yesterday said the tim-ing of Bangladesh’s upcoming national election will be determined by the interim government and the political parties.
“It’s really a political party, government decision. We are not touching on timelines or that’s really a decision of the government and political parties have to make,” she told reporters after holding a meeting with Foreign Secretary Md Jashim Uddin at the Foreign Ministry in Dhaka.
During the meeting, the UNRC led a delegation of the UNDP’s needs assessment mission, visiting Bangladesh from New York following a request by the Bangladesh Election Commission (EC) for UN technical support to conduct the next general polls.
Lewis said the needs assessment team is on a mission here at the request of the Bangladesh Elec-tion Commission, which wrote to the UN seeking technical support for the upcoming elections.
She said that the United Nations is willing to extend its support for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Bangladesh. “The UN is interested in providing all technical and physical support to achieve this goal,” she added.
The UNDP needs assessment mission began its work this morning with a meeting with Chief Elec-tion Commissioner AMM Nasir Uddin, four election commissioners, and EC officials.
The team will stay in Bangladesh for 10 days and meet with various stakeholders, including politi-cal parties, civil society, and others involved with the election process.
When asked which political parties the mission will meet, Lewis said, “As many as possible…they (the needs assessment mission) will meet every political party we can think of in Bangladesh.”
The UNRC said her colleagues will assess what makes sense in terms of what the UN can offer, as the Election Commission has requested technical support for the national election, not local gov-ernment elections.
