Meeting held between AB Party and NDI-IRI team

A delegation of Amar Bangladesh Party (ABP) met the joint election assessment team of US-based International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI) on Tuesday.

The US team arrived in Dhaka last week to conduct a limited technical assessment focused on potential  electoral violence conditions before, during, and after the country's 7 January election. 

The team was represented by Dr Geoffrey Macdonald, a senior advisor in the Asia Division at the IRI; Nenad Marinkovic, a security and physical violence expert; and Ivylo Pentchev, an information environment analyst.

ABP delegation was formed by the party's Member Secretary Mojibur Rahman Monju, Joint Convenor and Supreme Court's lawyer Tajul Islam, Joint Member Secretaries Asaduzzaman Fuaad and Zubair Ahmed Bhuiyan, and the party's women wing's in-charge Nasreen Sultana Mily. The meeting lasted for more than an hour and took place in an uptown area of the capital city.
Initially, the IRI-NDI team was briefed about the AB Party, a new-generation political platform that aspires to base its politics on problem-solving through devising issue-based policies and programmes.

Then the discussion moved to the forthcoming election and associated issues. The team was interested to know about the reasons for the denial of electoral registration and updates on the judicial review application outstanding at the High Court division of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.

AB Party has been consistent in its call for a non-partisan election-time government to hold a free, fair, participatory, and credible election which simply cannot take place under an incumbent who lacks legitimacy.

Referring to the previous 11 elections, four were largely accepted as credible which were held under a neutral caretaker government when all the incumbents failed to be re-elected, said a press release.