In a press conference on Thursday, the chairperson of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission Sima Samar said that she encourages all men and women who have registered to vote, to take active part in the electoral process and cast their vote on the day of the elections.
However, in another statement, Ms Samar expressed concern over the possibly time-consuming process of biometric technology based voting. She said that she is afraid there might a possibility of the biometric devices failing to work as expected on election day.
She also called on security organisations to provide proper safety for the people. She added “every person’s life is very important,” while referring to candidate deaths in the past few days.
Finally, she called on IEC to focus on polling stations that are under threat. Ms Samar pointed out that the AIHRC has recorded 30 cases of “serious attacks” during the election process in which 54 people are estimated to have lost their lives and 186 others were injured.
The AIHRC Chairperson’s statements come after violent attacks targeting people and candidates have occurred increasingly over the past few week. While many candidates got out safe, many others lost their lives. This has been a concern of the UNAMA as well who also released a statement the past week.
