Special Representative
To:
PA President
and
PA Secretary General
PC Brief Weeks 2/3, 2019
During the past two weeks there have been the opening sessions of the
Permanent Council (PC)
–
Chairmanship Slovakia - and the Forum for Se-
curity Cooperation (FSC)
–
Chairmanship Switzerland. The second PC
heard and debated the address of the OSCE PA President. In addition,
there was the two-day Annual Meeting of Heads of Institutions and Field
Presences. The News from Copenhagen reported about these events. It is
noteworthy again, however, that the debate following the address of Presi-
dent Tsereteli was again very comprehensive, in-depth and marked by a
considerable degree of fruitful interaction.
The increasingly good climate and fruitful cooperation with the governmen-
tal side was also the subject of the many intensive informal meetings that
the PA President and the PA Secretary General participated in.
The
OSCE’s
failure to adopt the 2019 Unified Budget on time continues to
worry participating States as well as the Secretariat, Institutions and Mis-
sions. On December 2018, there were no objections of substance against
the budget. However, because one delegation argues that it is impossible
to adopt a budget without valid Scales of Contribution, there was no con-
sensus regarding its adoption. The Slovak Chairmanship is making efforts
at the highest-level to find a solution for a problem that the participating
States have not managed to solve for the past two decades. Hopefully, this
will not affect other budgetary discussions, like the one on the Special Mon-
itoring Mission to Ukraine which expires March 31.
The OSCE Academic Network presented the report of the Project on Reli-
gion and Conflict prevention in the OSCE context, an interesting plea to
make better use of religious institutions when addressing the conflict cycle.
Andreas Nothelle
Ambassador
January 22, 2019