OSCE, Alm.del - 2013-14 - Bilag 25: Nyhedsbrev fra Ambassadør Andreas Nothelle, uge 10, 2014

PC Brief Week 10, 2014The week was overshadowed by the events in Ukraine. The situation also – partly – impacted on thetone of the debates, in which some ambassadors did not adhere to the usual diplomatic language. Itshould have been the week of the Annual Implementation Assessment Meeting (AIAM – on the im-plementation of Confidence Building Measures), but this meeting, too, was devoted – in part – to polit-ical rather than (as in previous years) purely technical issues. Besides that, there were meetings of thePermanent Council (PC), a joint meeting of both decision-making bodies (Forum for Security Coopera-tion – FSC – and PC), the Contact Group with the Mediterranean Partners, the Preparatory Commit-tee, and other committee meetings, among them the Human Dimension Committee which was ad-dressed by the Chair of the PA’s third committee, Isabel Santos. Two afternoons were devoted to thehearings of the candidates to succeed Ambassador Lenarcic as Director of the ODIHR. Throughoutthe week, Roberto Montella accompanied President Krivokapic; first to Prague and then to Paris.Both informal and formal meetings revolved around searching for activities that the OSCE could un-dertake in order to deescalate the tensions in Ukraine. The ultimate goal is to deploy an OSCE moni-toring mission, but while these negotiations continue, including on a draft decision, the participatingStates, the Chairmanship, the Secretariat and the Institutions have taken steps that did not need for-mal decision-making. The first followed Ukraine’s request for participating States to send military ob-servers to Ukraine, based on Art. 18 of the Vienna Document, which might have been inspired by theparallel holding of the AIAM. Such a mission, while based on a document that belongs to the OSCEacquis, remains a bundling of bilateral actions by participating States and is not – as sometimeswrongly described – an “OSCE Mission”. Other activities undertaken include the deployment of theChairmanship’s Special Representative Tim Guldimann, who visited the Crimea together with the HighCommissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) Astrid Thors, the Secretariat’s opening of a project onfurthering dialogue within Ukraine to be funded by donations, and the deployment of Human RightsMonitors by the ODIHR and the HCNM. Ukraine has also requested that the PA contributes to theseefforts, but such a visit did not occur because the Russian interlocutors did not find the PA’s requestedmeetings timely.Despite the ongoing parallel meetings, Isabel Santos’s presentation in the Human Dimension Commit-tee resonated strongly and was hailed by the Chairman of the pertinent PC committee, AmbassadorKvile of Norway. In the constituent meeting of the Group of Friends on Mediation, Romania urged thedelegates to include the PA prominently in the efforts.The hearings of the candidates for Director of the ODIHR did not result in a clear indication of whomight be the front-runner. However, seen from a PA perspective, only Michael Link (Germany), himselfa former PA member, devoted substantial parts of his presentation to ideas about closer cooperationwith the OSCE PA. He and the Icelandic candidate Sigurdsson, another Member of Parliament, alsomet with me to discuss our expectations, while the Czech candidate Mareš, a diplomat and lecturerwith some parliamentary experience, expressed regret that he had not found time for such a meeting.However, both Sigurdsson and Mareš, when mentioning the PA in their presentations, addressed it asan outside actor similar the Council of Europe or the NGOs. Sigurdsson corrected this in our bilateralmeeting. The Latvian candidate Makarovs did not mention the PA at all in his presentation. Next week,the Chairmanship will ask participating States for their impressions.