By Sallieu S. Kanu
The Chairperson of the National Elections Watch (NEW), Marcella Samba Sesay has said that members of her organisation and herself have been subjected to harassment and personal attacks.
Mrs. Marcella Samba Sesay said such attacks are not new, adding that they had been directed at them in 2012, 2018 and 2023 after they presented their finding on elections outcomes.
She said that what is new is that a section of members of civil society organisations have formed themselves into a coalition to attack members of NEW. “This is strange. They have been all over the place saying negative things about NEW and its members,” she said.
“This is very wrong.”
The NEW chairperson said that they still stand by their projection. NEW projected that no presidential candidate would secure the connotational threshold of 55 percent of total valid votes cast to avoid a runoff. This projection was at odds with the Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone (ECSL) results. President Julius Maada was re-elected to a second term with 56% of the vote, narrowly avoiding a run-off against main rivals from the main opposition All People’s Congress, Dr. Samura Mathew Wilson Kamara, who had about 41%, according to the official tally.
“We still stand by what we said,” she said
Local and international organisations NDI regrets that Sierra Leoneans who organized themselves to observe elections under the umbrella coalition of NEW are now subject to harassment and personal attacks.
The United Nations Special Rapporteurs consider election observers like NEW as human rights defenders who therefore should be afforded all the same protections.
The United Nations Special Rapporteurs explicitly urged Member States to “take all necessary steps to establish conditions that allow national and international election observers to effectively do their work, and to protect them from any violence, threats, retaliation… as a consequence of their legitimate exercise of their rights and freedoms.”
Mrs. Samba Sesay said that the objective of NEW is to promote peace consolidation and peace building by promoting trust and confidence in the electoral system.
She said that such attacks on her persons and members of NEW must stop as authorities have a responsibility to protect them.