Sona Ayvazyan, Deputy Director of Transparency International Anticorruption Center participated in a side event "Citizens' election observation under pressure" held by European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE) during the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM) of the OSCE-ODIHR in Warsaw on 25 September 2015. The event addressed the increasing political, legal, administrative pressure against independent citizens' observers in the OSCE region during the last years, which directly affected members of the EPDE.

The event brought together representatives from EPDE member organizations to discuss how international institutions and international civil society should react to the challenges for independent election observation in the OSCE region and how a global liberal civil society could be defended. Examples from Russian Federation, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Belarus were presented at the discussion.