Special Representative
To:
PA President
and
PA Secretary General
PC Brief Week 43, 2015
This week there were meetings of the Permanent Council (PC), Forum for Security Co-operation (FSC) (on
Nordic Defense Cooperation), the Contact Group with the Asian Partners for Co-operation, the Preparato-
ry Committee (PrepComm), the Advisory Committee on Management and Finance (ACMF), the Security
and the Economic and Environmental Committees, as well as a two-day Economic and Environmental Di-
mension Implementation Meeting on Good Governance.
The Permanent Council approved a decision on date and place of the next OSCE-Asian Conference in Thai-
land (June 6 and 7, 2016). It had another routine agenda (reports by the Co-Chairs of the Geneva talks on
Georgia and by the Economic and Environmental Coordinator). Under “Current Issues”, there was – for
the first time since the cease-fire in Eastern Ukraine began to be effective - a heavy polemic between a
member of the Russian delegation and the US Ambassador. After a long back-and-forth on the issues re-
lated to Ukraine, the US, on another item, stated its expectations regarding the political situation in the
former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, with Russia replying that this situation called for internal dialogue
without outside interference. In another statement, this time on the situation in Montenegro, the US
called on the anti-government demonstrators for restraint. Russia also raised the issue of ODIHR’s perfor-
mance regarding the recent elections in Canada, criticizing the “small size” of the observer team it had
deployed to the country, which triggered the usual discussions about the autonomy of the institutions in
determining their methodology.
Under the next item of “Current Issues”, Azerbaijan, repeated its related criticism of the ODIHR for its de-
cision not to observe the Azerbaijani elections next week because of the severe restrictions that the coun-
try had imposed on the size of its observation mission, and also criticized ODIHR’s decision to postpone
the sending of an expert team for talks until after the election day. Western countries defended the
ODIHR and its policy to base the strength of their election teams on the needs assessment, repeating their
criticism of Azerbaijan because of the restrictions it had imposed, while Russia reiterated its call for uni-
form rules, including for the size of observation teams. I referred to the latest News from Copenhagen
article regarding the meeting between PA Secretary General Oliver, Director Link and the Head of the Eu-
ropean Parliament’s election department, who had voiced their support for their organizations’ decisions
not to observe. The statement had become necessary because of some confusion created by rumors
about ODIHR’s alleged intention to partly revise its decision. I also underlined the PA’s interest in continu-
ing the good cooperation with Azerbaijan, to which it replied that the PA had broken off this cooperation
by its the decision not to observe, and that it is now on the PA to act if it wants to resume cooperation.
This week’s Economic and Environmental Dimension Implementation Meeting (EEDIM) focused on com-
bating corruption. Participation seemed comparatively lower than in past years. The panel on next steps in
preventing corruption in the OSCE region did not result in a real debate, mostly due to time constraints.
The focus of most contributions was on the presentation of national practices and domestic strategies,
which was seen as a valuable exchange, but took place at the expense of finding a common OSCE
approach in preventing corruption.
Andreas Nothelle
Ambassador, October 27, 2015