For the first time ever, foreign observers will supervise the Swedish EU election.

When Sweden’s foreign minister Carl Bildt said that an independent group should monitor the EU elections, he was probably referring to observations in states with a somewhat more unstable democracy than the Swedish.

However, for the first time ever an international human rights group will keep an eye on the Swedish election for the European parliament.

“We indeed have a team of experts in Sweden this week for the EU elections”, Jens-Hagen Eschenbaecher, spokesperson at OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said to The Swedish Wire.

Both the Feminist party and the Pirate party have demanded that the Swedish election should be monitored in order to avoid any misconduct, the political blog Politikerbloggen writes.

But Jens-Hagen Eschenbaecher dismisses all suggestions that Sweden is under suspicion of cheating.

“It is not because we had a particular concern that we selected Sweden as one of the countries to which we have sent an expert team. Our decision took into account the fact that we have never observed an election in Sweden”, he said.

A group of 22 experts, headed by Vadim Zhdanovich of Russia, will assess pan-European election matters in 15 selected member states, as well as relevant national legal frameworks, the work of election administrations and the conduct of the campaign.