KIEV, Ukraine - Europe's human rights watchdog today urged Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych to accept defeat in his nation's presidential elections, saying the victory by his Western-leaning opponent was clear.

Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko has already claimed victory in Sunday's rerun of Ukraine's fraud-filled Nov. 21 presidential election, but the pro-Russian Yanukovych has not conceded defeat and has said he would demand the results be canceled.

"I will never recognize such a defeat, because the constitution and human rights were violated in our country," Yanukovych told reporters Monday evening.

The official tally from the vote gave Yushchenko 52 percent compared to Yanukovych's 44 percent, with 99.9 percent of precincts counted by this morning. Turnout was 77.2 percent. Once the election commission releases the final preliminary results, the candidates have seven days to appeal.

Yanukovych said his campaign team had nearly 5,000 complaints about how the voting was conducted. He claimed 4.8 million had been disenfranchised, among them disabled and elderly voters who allegedly had been unable to cast ballots because of an election law reform that restricted home voting. The Constitutional Court decided just on the eve of the vote to throw out the restrictions.

He promised to challenge the results of the vote, but said he had not asked his supporters to organize protests.

"We will act in accordance with the laws of Ukraine. We will go down a legal path," Yanukovych said.

From Strasbourg, France, the Council of Europe, the continent's premier human rights watchdog, called on Yanukovych to accept defeat.

"I call on all parties to accept the verdict of the ballot box and to refrain from rhetoric which may fuel division in Ukraine," Terry Davis, the council's secretary general, said today.

He said Sunday's vote, a rerun of the Nov. 21 ballot, has resolved Ukraine's political crisis. Ukraine's Supreme Court annulled the results of November's vote because of fraud.

Meanwhile, an official whom the opposition had accused of helping engineer the election fraud, Transport Minister Heorhiy Kirpa, was found dead Monday with a gunshot wound, said Railways spokesman Eduard Zanyuk.