Special Representative

To:PA PresidentandPA Secretary GeneralPermanent Council Brief Week 29, 2012This week, there were meetings of the PC, the FSC, the Mediterranean Contact Group, subsidiarybodies and several meetings of informal working groups.For the first time since I arrived in Vienna, I have been invited to attend the usual ambassadorial EUlunch hosted by the EU Presidency. We will have to see whether this novel initiative by Cyprus will berepeated. For a long time I have criticized that (apart from knowledge that I acquire from othersources) I know very little about the national positions of individual EU member countries, who agreeon a joint position before the EU Presidency speaks on concrete substance in those bodies that thePA is allowed to attend. If the invitation to this EU meeting becomes general practice, I might learnmore about individual positions in the future.The participants at this week’s lunch discussed - with Amb. Kobieracki, the Director Conflict Preven-tion Center (CPC) - issues that the CPC deals with, in particular how the ideas contained in the OSCESecretary General’s report on addressing the conflict cycle could be implemented. As such, the lunchwas a follow-up to a meeting of the respective informal working group, which had taken place the pre-ceding day. During this meeting, several countries, among them Russia and Turkey, again underlinedthe importance of the consensus principle, urging that all important steps that the Chairmanship or theSecretariat and Institutions would want to take had to be dealt with in the decision-making bodies. Inaddition, Azerbaijan and Georgia outlined their specific concerns about possible activities of theChairmanship and the Secretariat. Russia believes that the OSCE has sufficient tools at its disposalalready now, and it stressed that the participating States should be consulted even on internal guide-lines of the Secretariat. In this context, the participants at the lunch discussed the problems caused bythe limited mandates of the executive structures, which in many cases makes early warning activitiesimpossible, even when the Secretariat and the field presences possess the necessary information.Another issue discussed was frictions and jealousies between executive structures, as well as theneed for more accountability and performance assessment.In the meeting with the Mediterranean Partners for Cooperation I presented to the participants – uponrequest by the Ukrainian chairmanship of the Contact Group - the outcome of the Annual Session inMonaco, and in particular of the PA’s Mediterranean Forum. Unfortunately, the Chairmanship hatchosen to put a lengthy and mostly technical presentation by the ODIHR with the Albanian electoralreform between the first items on the agenda and my presentation. This resulted in an almost totalabsence of ambassadors, in particular from the Partner countries, when, after more than two hours,the point was finally called up. I did, however, get a response from the delegations of the EU and theUSA. I also used the opportunity to refer to President Migliori’s Press Statement on the terrorist kill-ings at Burgas Airport.All participating States seem to have accepted Mongolia’s application for full OSCE membership; theadoption of a decision will, however, be slightly delayed due to some predominantly technical prob-lems with the regional application of the Vienna Document and Mongolia’s participation in the work ofthe FSC.