Special Representative
To:
PA President
and
PA Secretary General
November 16, 2018
PC Brief Week 38-46, 2018
These weeks were marked by an extensive involvement of Liaison Office Staff in OSCE PA activities outside
of Vienna and a considerable number of visits by OSCE PA officers to Vienna, which the News from Copen-
hagen have already reported about. OSCE PA activities staffed by the Office included the visit of Special
Representative for South East Europe Mark Pritchard to Serbia, the Bishkek Fall Session, the Election Obser-
vation Missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia, the Needs Assessment Mission to Armenia, the
Presidential visits to Bratislava, Italy, the Holy See and San Marino, the Cetinje Parliamentary Forum (where
I held two key note speeches on election-related matters), a Rome Meeting of Political Directors and the
Madrid Conference on Victims of Terrorism. PA President Tsereteli addressed the PC on 11 October, fol-
lowed by a presentation at a side event of an Inter-Parliamentary Conference for the EU Common Foreign
and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy and an anniversary reception organized
by the Vienna Office. The Chair of the Committee on Countering Terrorism Makis Voridis came to Vienna to
speak at the 2nd OSCE-wide seminar on Passenger Data exchange and again at the Security Committee. The
Rapporteur of the OSCE PA`s Human Rights Committee Kyriakos Kyriakou-Hadjiyianni participated in a Sup-
plementary Human Dimension Meeting on Human Rights and Education. The OSCE PA`s Second Committee
Rapporteur Elena Gjebrea Hoxha participated in the Economic and Environmental Dimension Implementa-
tion Meeting (EEDIM). I represented the OSCE PA as an opening speaker at the ODIHR Seminar on Election
Observation and Election Campaigns.
There were meetings of the PC
–
including a joint one with the Forum for Security Cooperation (FSC) on
Structured Dialogue and a Special PC on the illegal
electio s
in Eastern Donbas, Ukraine, - of the FSC, of
the Committees and other informal sub-structures, as well as the events mentioned above, plus a Confer-
ence on Women in the Security Sector, a Conference on Gender and Second Dimension: Digital Transfor-
mation, and an OSCE Seminar "Leveraging migration for socio-economic
de elop e t
. In addition to the
addresses by PA members we spoke at several of these presenting the
PA’s
positions and activities.
The output of all these meetings in terms of decisions was minimal: A decision to forward Draft Agenda to
the Ministerial Council, the Timetable of the Twenty-fifth Meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council and the
Dates and Venue of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Implementation Assessment Meeting (AIAM). However, the
Milan Ministerial Council will most probably be held without modalities due to conflicting views on which
International Organizations should be officially invited to attend.
A number of Western countries invoked the
Mosco Mecha is
, an investigation by human rights ex-
perts into
alleged
human rights
iolatio s
in the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation, referring to
27 individuals who allegedly were extrajudicially executed by Chechen authorities in Grozny in 2017.
The drafting of MC documents is at the centre of attention (list of 14 November attached), with six of them
mentioning the importance of PA activities in the fields of the fight against terrorism, digital economy, com-
bating gender-based violence, promoting women political participation and in the Draft Milan declaration
on dialogue, ownership and responsibility for a safer Europe, as well as in the Draft declaration on the
OSCE’S
efforts in addressing the crisis in and around Ukraine.
Andreas Nothelle, Ambassador