Special Representative
To:
PA President
and
PA Secretary General
PC Brief Week 20/21, 2017
During the past two weeks there have been meetings by the Permanent Council
(PC) and the Forum for Security Cooperation (FSC), as well as of the Preparatory
Committee (PrepCom), the Advisory Committee on Management and Finance
(ACMF), the three topical committees, and many more informal meetings. In addi-
tion, there was a two-day 2017 OSCE-wide Counter-Terrorism Conference, at-
tended by PA Special Representative on Terrorism Nikolay Kovalev and PA Depu-
ty Secretary General Dzakhaev. I spent the first week on a field visit of the PA
Special Representative on South East Europe, VP Roberto Battelli, and another
two days of the second week at the election observation coordination meeting in
Warsaw. All three events have been covered in Press Releases and the News
from Copenhagen. In parallel to the second week of Vienna meetings, there was
also the 2017 OSCE Youth Conference in Malaga, where the OSCE PA was rep-
resented by Ruta Miliute, MP, Lithuania.
Neither the PC nor the FSC took any decision. In fact, it failed to decide the calen-
dar of the Human Dimension events, with the consequence, that the annual Hu-
man Dimension Seminar that was planned to take place in two weeks, had to be
cancelled. Apart from the usual exchange on Ukraine and related topics under
“Current Issues”,
the PC heard and debated a number of routine reports from the
field. There was also an address by a Vice President of the European Commis-
sion,
Maroš Šefčovič,
in charge of the Energy Union. The main focus of the sec-
ond week was on the very well-attended Anti-Terrorism Conference.
Although there is a number of rumours, officially there has been no progress so far
on the appointments of senior OSCE officials. On some, the Chairmanship has still
not received feedback from a number of delegations. Also, there is still no consen-
sus on the 2017 OSCE Budget, the delay of which is now beating all previous rec-
ords and obviously creating tremendous difficulties.
Italy has seconded an additional staff person to the Office. Liaison Officer and Ad-
visor Marco Bonabello, previously employed by the OSCE Secretariat, started
working on May 15.
Andreas Nothelle
Ambassador
May 26, 2017