Hello and welcome to Newsar from the BBC World Service

come in you live from our studios in Central London I'm Julian Marshall and we go first to Georgia, the country that is, where a team of international observers has

issued a damning report on Saturday's parliamentary election, which the country's electoral commission says was won by the governing

Georgian Dream Party.

The election is seen as critical in determining whether Georgia aligns itself more closely with the West or with Russia.

In a moment we'll hear from one of the observers who in the past few hours have held a news conference

at which they outlined numerous violations both on voting day itself and during the campaign.

But even before that, the pro-EU opposition had claimed that the election was rigged.

As at Karimov is an official from an opposition party who was hospitalized after being beaten up in Tbilisi.

He told the BBC he called the police to report election fraud.

After that a local town councillor stormed up to him.

I told him I was waiting for the police. He started hitting me. Then another 10 men joined in.

I heard him saying that my party is a terrorist group of Europe and America.

Well it's here now from an intellectual observer the Spanish MEP Antonio

Lopez historians White is head of the European Parliament delegation and the international election observer mission of the OSCE.

He's part of the centre-right EPP group within the European Parliament.

What had he and his colleagues been able to observe about the conduct of these elections?

We continue to express deep concerns about the democratic backsliding in Georgia.

The conduct of yesterday's election is unfortunately evidence to that effect.

We will continue to closely follow the situation in

Georgia to see if the next government chooses to realign with EU values and

norms and reverse the negative tendencies of the last months.

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