Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is with a sense of pride and satisfaction that we can today present you our preliminary statement on the Pakistani elections 2008. Before I come to this statement itself, allow me to make the following remarks:

This preliminary statement contains the findings of our short and long term observers as well as of our Core Team, which started to build up the mission from 8 Dec 2008 after a decision by Commissioner Ferrero-Waldner to send an election observation mission to Pakistan. This assessment team was then headed by Jorgen Grunnet, for whose contribution we are still very grateful, as he laid the logistic fundament for our work. De facto starting with 1 January, Hannah Roberts has taken over this position. I myself arrived here as Chief Observer on 27 December 2007.

After the re-scheduling of the timetable as a consequence of the Bhutto assassination, our 48 long term observers have been deployed throughout the four provinces since 10 January. For election day they were reinforced by short term observers from the EU and by local EU embassy staff. I am especially grateful that the EP has sent a 7 member delegation to observe as well. This shows our political interest in the development of Pakistan. These colleagues headed by Robert Evans, seated on my side, have contributed valuably to our findings and I thank them very much already at this stage.

Our LTOs have since covered 65% of constituencies and on the ground contacted parties, civil society, media, and local stakeholders. Their reporting has been the valuable basis for our assessment. Moreover the Core Team in Islamabad has focused on the political situation, the legal framework for elections, the media environment, human rights questions, etc. We have contacted the major political parties, care-taker government and numerous NGOs and civil society organizations.

It is with this background of information, insight and application of our ever further developed methodology to assess international standards of democratic elections, that we present our findings today. As the only long term international election observation team we are convinced that our assessment truly assesses the election environment here.

I want to make clear from the outset, that these findings are not related to the election result, which means that the result our findings would have been exactly the same had the so far ruling party retained its position sitting on the government benches.

We therefore will also not comment on the outcome of the election as such, or join other politicians or media inside and outside the country in their considerations about future coalitions or the political future of President Musharraf or other persons. The wider EU policies towards Pakistan will also have to be discussed on other occasions, certainly in the European Parliament both with our Council of Ministers and the European Commission.

Having said that let me therefore now start to read out the executive summary of our preliminary statement