From 17 to 18 February 2015 the Division of Electoral Assistance will host a working group meeting on the revision of the Council of Europe Handbooks for domestic election observers – the one on Reporting on Elections and the other on Using international standards in Elections. Both handbooks were developed in the framework of the EU-CoE Eastern Partnership (EaP) Facility Programme Phase I (2010 – 2013) Council of Europe (CoE) and they serve as guidelines for domestic observers, explaining step by step how an election report is written, how it is structured, which language is used, what to include and what not to include in the report, and how to assess elections against international standards.

The activity is financed by the new EU-CoE Eastern Partnership Facility Programme Phase II (2015 – 2017). The working group will have to come up with a structure for each handbook comprising the fields of domestic observation: a theoretical and a practical part. On the basis of the updated Handbooks, the Council of Europe will launch an e-learning course with the possibility to get certified from the Council of Europe.