-5- CDL-AD(2020)025 the rules and procedures are often not well understood by electoral subjects.13 Furthermore, members of relevant bodies, in particular members of election commissions, are not always sufficiently trained on election complaints and appeals’ rules. 11. Beyond the legislation itself, the international election observers, primarily from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the OSCE/ODIHR, have regularly underlined in their assessments of elections inter alia the following issues: overly expeditious complaints and appeals’ procedures; a lack of impartiality or of effective remedies; overlapping jurisdictions; a lack of substantive judgments while dealing with complaints lodged before electoral management bodies or courts. 12. The report will be divided as follows. 13. The report introduces first the international instruments and soft-law dealing with the right to free elections with a view to better understand and interpret domestic legal frameworks. Part III of the report will deal with the topic of international instruments and case-law. At international level, election dispute resolution systems are dealt with by international binding texts, by the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights and by standards, mainly developed at European level by the Venice Commission.14 14. Among the issues at stake concerning election dispute resolution, there are procedural challenges and in particular the question of the bodies competent to deal with the settlement of electoral disputes. In a number of countries, electoral laws and relevant procedural laws are confusing or lack relevant provisions to establish a clear competency of administrative and/or jurisdictional bodies for different grounds for complaints. Such bodies can be electoral management bodies or courts – i.e. constitutional, general, administrative or specialised courts – or more rarely other types of bodies or institutions. Sometimes, the lines between the types of disputes and the competent bodies to deal with such disputes are blurred. The report will develop the question of the bodies competent to deal with the settlement of electoral disputes in its Part IV. 15. Addressing election dispute resolution systems also implies dealing with the type of complaints that can be lodged by complainants. In this respect, situations vary greatly depending on the countries since election dispute resolution systems potentially concern almost all steps of an electoral process. Part V of the report will develop the situations observed in the various electoral laws concerning the most important grounds for complaints and decisions, actions or inactions open to challenge.15 16. The analysis of the actors of the electoral process who are or should be entitled to lodge complaints (the standing), namely citizens, candidates, political parties, non-governmental organisations, inter alia, is also essential for assessing the effectiveness of election dispute resolution systems. Part VI of the report will deal with this issue of the persons entitled to complain. 17. The Code of good practice in electoral matters,16 the Council of Europe’s reference document in the electoral field, recommends that time limits for lodging and deciding 13 Electoral subjects are primarily candidates and political parties, voters, as well as any other domestic actor impacted by or involved in an electoral process, such as the civil society, mass media, election administration etc. 14 In addition to Part III, the report contains an annex (Annex 2) which presents a selection of relevant electionrelated case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. 15 Provisions from electoral laws were analysed concerning the following stages of the electoral process: electionday operations, voting, counting and tabulation operations, transmission of election results and issuance of election results. 16 2002 Code of good practice in electoral matters: Guidelines and Explanatory Report. More details on the document are available under Part III, Section D.