Guidelines for Understanding, Adjudicating, and Resolving Disputes in Elections cedures and issues.245 These programs entail large-scale public outreach to explain the powers and limitations of the complaints system, as well as training for legal unions, human rights and other civil society organizations, electoral management bodies (EMB), political parties, candidates, and any other persons with standing to bring challenges and complaints.246 It is important that the public receives comprehensible and easily accessible information on elections generally, but particularly on the rights afforded to them to redress election irregularities. The stakeholders involved in the electoral complaints adjudication process have different educational needs. Indeed, lawyers and arbiters need to understand the whole process of the claim: the parties who have legal standing; the required burden of proof; the possible appeals; and the sanctions and penalties. On the other hand, political parties, candidates and electoral management bodies need to know how to file a claim, which entity has jurisdiction to handle such a claim, and what evidentiary elements they should collect to support their claim. Understanding challenges and complaints may also lessen the workload of the complaints adjudication body, which will have to deal with electoral stakeholders that attempt to avoid accountability. In the light of this variety of stakeholders and needs, education and training programs should target individual groups, with the overall goal of improving the general understanding of the electoral complaints adjudication process. A. Education of the General Public Civic and voter education can encourage citizens to participate in democratic processes.247 The United Nations Human Rights Committee has stressed that voter education and registration campaigns are necessary to ensure the effective exercise of the right to participation in government “by an informed community.”248 As discussed throughout this guide, public confidence is an important factor for stability, and it will give more legitimacy to Id. § 4(1). Afghanistan Challenges, supra note 29, at 25. 247 U.N. Development Programme, Democratic Governance Group, Bureau for Development Policy, Civic and Voter Education: Electoral Assistance Implementation GuIde 42 (2007), available at http://www.undp.org/governance/docs/UNDP-Electoral-Assistance-Implementation-GuIde.pdf. 248 CCPR General Comment No. 25, supra note 84, ¶ 11. 245 246 78