OSCE, Alm.del - 2013-14 - Bilag 8: Nyhedsbrev fra Ambassadør Andreas Nothelle, uge 46, 2013

PC Brief Week 46, 2013This week, there were meetings of the Permanent Council (PC), the Forum for Security Cooperation (FSC),the Contact Group with the Mediterranean Partners for Cooperation, as well as numerous meetings of the PCcommittees, other subsidiary bodies and informal gatherings. Marc Carillet participated in a two-day ACMFretreat which aimed to make progress in the negotiations of the 2014 OSCE Unified Budget.The PC decided to extend the mandates of the OSCE Presence in Albania, and the OSCE Missions to Monte-negro, Skopje, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and debated the ongoing efforts of the Minsk Group andthe Geneva talks to deal with the Conflicts in the South Caucasus, without being able to discern any progresson these issues. The FSC debated the future of Arms Control in Europe, a debate that led to a controversyabout the Russian statement that the CFE Regime was totally obsolete and could not even serve as a basisfor future arms control settlements.Compared to previous years, delegations do not seem to be very ambitious about the drafting of MinisterialCouncil (MC) documents. The two draft declarations (the "political" declaration and the one on Helsinki+40)that the Chairmanship has proposed might contain the lowest possible denominator for agreement, whichmost delegations seem to see as sufficient. The U.S., however, expressed the opinion that such a politicaldeclaration would not lead anywhere and would therefore be unacceptable, particularly stressing that they donot see any added value in passing another Helsinki+40 declaration given the already existing one thatpassed in Dublin.It also appears that there is little chance that essential Human Dimension issues that did not find consensuallanguage at the previous MC meetings will achieve consensus this time, especially in light of the absence ofreadiness West of Vienna to take on board concerns from CIS countries as expressed in documents proposedby them. The exception is an apparent break-through on Cyber-Security. In a last-minute agreement, the in-formal working group that has been dealing with it for two years finalized a set of Confidence BuildingMeasures (CBMs).Also, this year, some delegations make it more difficult than in previous years to insert language into docu-ments that refer to the work and/or the recommendations of the PA. Three delegations (Canada, supported bythe Czech Republic and Russia) have explicitly objected to drafting suggestions from the PA based on anunnecessarily restricted interpretation of the Rules of Procedure, despite the fact that for many years this hasbeen handled differently, and the Chair of that particular committee was ready to continue this past practice.The last meeting of the Contact Group with the Mediterranean Partners for this year dealt with the conclusionsfrom the OSCE Mediterranean Conference that had been held in Monaco. Here as well I called for explicitreferences to the work of the PA in pertinent documents (PA.GAL/9/13). The second main point of this meet-ing was Libya’s application for the status of a Partner. All delegations present spoke in favor of a swift decisionabout the application.With numerous aspects of the budget proposal that remained controversial in the retreat, this year’s budgetaryprocess seems to be as bumpy as in previous years. Complicating the picture, a fracture within the EU isemerging between those, led by the UK, who would like to decrease their contribution to the OSCE budgetand others, mostly Scandinavians and Central-Europeans, who favor a budget that matches the expectationslinked with the implementation of the mandate of the organization.

Special Representative