OSCE, Alm.del - 2012-13 - Bilag 24: Nyhedsbrev fra Ambassadør Andreas Nothelle, uge 12, 2013

PC Brief Week 12, 2013This week, meetings of the PC, and the last meeting of the FSC under the Chairmanship of Liechtensteintook place, as well as meetings of the Preparatory Committee, the Human Dimension Committee and theAdvisory Committee on Management and Finance. In parallel, the OSCE held its OSCE-Australia Confer-ence. Friday was an official OSCE holiday. The Permanent Council meeting was an unusually short one. Themain issue is currently the lack of consensus on the annual Human Dimension events. As announced, Azer-baijan continues to block the consensus.In the PC, OSCE Secretary General Zannier replied to my statement of last week. Key points from his replyare: Political oversight is guaranteed through his annual report to the Ministerial Council and his reporting tothe PC, and parliamentary accountability takes place through the oversight by national parliaments over thenational governments. Furthermore, he stated “I am not aware of any specific decision by the MCassigninga direct oversight role to the OSCE PA.However, and notwithstanding this fact, I have accepted to contin-ue the practice, initiated by my predecessor, of briefing the PA Standing Committee, in its Fall Session,about the OSCE budget, and discussing related management issues. This openness on my part, however,seems to have been misunderstood as a general acknowledgment that a degree of oversight role ofthe OSCE PA exists.To correct this false impression, I will be forced to discontinue this kind of briefings tothe PA Standing Committee, and include more general information about budgeting and management mat-ters in my remarks to the Winter Session.” Referring to internal procedures and controls, he added that theannual audit, which is performed by national audit institutions and regularly issues a “clean bill of health”,ensures sufficient oversight. Like last week, Canada attacked my statement saying that it had “gone too far”,did not reflect a cooperative spirit and that this was not what taxpayers paid OSCE institutions for.In the Audit Report of 2005, the External Auditors, at the time from the UK, stated: “… the OSCE might re-view its arrangements for engaging external audit services and introduce open competition. These arrange-ments should be based on assessment against objective and competitively assessed criteria such as tech-nical quality, experience and price; ensuring that the Organization meets the full costs of the external auditso as to secure a demonstrably objective and independent audit process; and that the period of tenure isextended beyond one year to between four and six years, in order to provide for a more stable, effective andefficient audit scrutiny." In the opinion, the auditors went into many more details of their recommendations.This, and the long list of resolutions since the 2001 Paris PA Annual Session, which led to the constitution ofthe Committee on Transparency and Accountability, as well as the PA’s recommendations during the CorfuProcess, were the reference points for my statement. The reaction we received represents a clear rejectionof the PA's calls for direct reporting to the PA and a stronger role for the PA in the budget and audit process.In my reply, I acknowledged that the Secretary General had accurately described the existing, mainly Execu-tive Branch-internal system. I defended the right of the PA to recommend changes of this status quo, andexpressed regret over his announcement to discontinue an established practice that had been put in placemore than ten years ago and successfully practiced by his two predecessors. Later I learnt that Zannier toldothers he had taken the decision to discontinue briefing the PA already before last week’s statement. Afterthe meeting, a Western ambassador told me that he had just raised the same concerns about a lack oftransparency and performance assessments, particularly in regards to projects financed by extra-budgetaryfunds.