The Right to a Genuine Electoral Democracy

The right to electoral democracy has long been endorsed by international law.Yet after dramatic global waves of democratization, in recent years democracy has been in recession.The lack of a strong consolidation of democracy in the international community finds its roots in early faults of international mechanisms: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which did not explicitly support the right to live in a democratic regime with a multiparty political system, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the right to "genuine elections" but failed to clarify whether these guarantee required party pluralism.Since half of the world's population now live under hybrid or authoritarian regimes, international law must take strong and progressive actions for embracing periodic genuine elections as the foundation of the international community.Steps must be taken to clarify that single-party elections and alike are incompatible with genuine elections, as they cannot guarantee the free will of the electors, and to ensure that election processes are free, fair and ultimately-genuine.