The group consisting of four people, sent on a mission by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, was in Caracas for over a month before the election on July 28. It was one of the few independent external observers invited by President Nicolas Maduro and his government.
The UN group praised the logistical implementation of the election – but directed sharp criticism at the electoral commission CNE and its decision to announce Maduro as the winner, without presenting detailed election results from the country's 30,000 polling stations.
According to the organization, this approach is unprecedented in modern, democratic elections.
"It had a negative impact on the confidence in the result announced by CNE among a large part of the Venezuelan voters," said the UN experts in a statement.
The criticism is similar to that previously made by another independent election observer, the American Carter Center, which earlier said that they could not verify CNE's results.
The opposition in Venezuela has stated that protocols collected directly from over 80 percent of the polling stations show that their candidate Edmundo González Urrutia actually won by a large margin.
The UN expert panel does not go as far as to validate the opposition's claims that González Urrutia won – but they say that the protocols published by the opposition appear to be genuine.
