Elene Nizharadze to serve as ISFED's executive director
The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED) has a new executive director. Following the expiration of Mikheil Benidze’s term in office, the organization’s nine-member board elected Elene Nizharadze as the new executive director.
Elene Nizharadze joined ISFED in 2012 as project coordinator in charge of electoral, local government and constitutional reforms. In 2017, she was promoted to the deputy executive director, and since then, has been supervising ISFED’s legislative reforms and policy research components. Elene coordinated ISFED’s projects and activities on election reform, voters’ list monitoring and European integration. She also represented the organization in electoral, local self-government and constitutional reform processes. In ISFED’s election monitoring efforts, Elene was responsible for functioning of the Incidents’ Center, as well as for managing the election dispute resolution processes and the post-election monitoring. She also has an experience in international election observation missions of OSCE and ENEMO.
Elene Nizharadze holds LLM in Comparative Constitutional Law from Central European University (Budapest, Hungary), and Master’s degree from Tbilisi State University.
Elene Nizharadze replaced Mikheil Benidze, who served as the executive director since 2016. According to the organization’s statute, a person can hold the position of the executive director for up to four years. Mikheil Benidze will remain at ISFED in the capacity of an advisor, and will assist the organization primarily with its social media monitoring component.