Special Representative
To:
PA President
and
PA Secretary General
PC Brief Week 16, 2015
This week, which was the first working week after the two-week Spring Recess, there were meet-
ings of the Permanent Council (PC), the Advisory Committee on Management and Finance
(ACMF), the Security Committee, the informal Working Group on Strengthening the Legal Frame-
work of the OSCE and other informal meetings, as well as a two-day Supplementary Human Di-
mension Committee Meeting (SHDM) on “Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association with
Emphasis on Freedom of Association”.
The PC did not take decisions. It was devoted mainly to current issues with an emphasis on the
conflict in and around Ukraine and on the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The debates
(on separate topics under the agenda item “Current Issues”) again resulted in a confrontation be-
tween the different narratives about the conflict – this time focusing on who started which breach of
the ceasefire. I referred to the latest press release by PA President Kanerva on the intimidation of
OSCE monitors, briefed delegations about the Franco-German PA Retreat, which took place be-
fore Easter, with the participation of members from the Russian and Ukrainian delegations. I also
expressed regret about another publication, this time signed by the OSCE Secretary General
Amb Zannier, which - when listing which institutions from “within the OSCE framework” had been
active and cooperating with the Special Monitoring Mission – omitted the PA, which might create
the impression that the PA is not part of the OSCE framework.
The Serbian Chairmanship and their Special Representative on the legal Personality of the OSCE,
former Danish Amb. John Bernhard, have amended their original proposals for different options
that could address the negative consequences of the fact that the OSCE is still lacking a legal sta-
tus and that its staff is therefore unprotected, especially in crisis situations like now in Ukraine. In
the respective working group, I announced the PA’s next Helsinki+40 Seminar which will take
place after the Bureau Meeting in Copenhagen and deal with the issue. The amended proposals
have taken care of a number of concerns I expressed in the last meeting of the working group.
However, the draft constituent document suffers from the diverging views between the PA and the
governmental side of the OSCE about status and role of the PA. I therefore stated that the present
reference it makes to the OSCE Rules of Procedure will not be sufficient. Also, the proposal for a
“Convention+ lists all governmental structures in a paragraph under the headline “Structure of the
OSCE” while the PA figures in a separate paragraph in the draft, creating the impression that it is
not part of the OSCE structures. I therefore urged to either include the PA under the paragraph on
the OSCE structure, or to change the headline of the paragraph.
The SDHM was attended by the usual human rights experts from the delegations and representa-
tives from NGOs dealing with human rights in certain countries East of Vienna, resulting in very
general discussions about the human rights situation in the OSCE.
Andreas Nothelle
Ambassador
April 20, 2015
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