Message from OSCE PA Secretary General Roberto Montella
on the beginning of his second term in Office
Copenhagen, 23 December 2020
Dear Members of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, dear Friends,
As you know, on 31 December 2020 my first mandate as Secretary General will come to an
end, and on 1 January 2021 the second five-year
term will start, following last year’s re-election
by the Standing Committee during the 2019 Luxembourg Annual Session. I am grateful for the
trust given to me and I am as committed and dedicated as ever to continue working hard for
our Assembly, the values it upholds and the objectives it aims at reaching.
I would now like to take stock of where we are at the end of my first mandate.
Since 2016, our
region
–
the whole northern hemisphere from Vancouver to Vladivostok
–
witnessed a number
of important developments which directly affected the work of the OSCE and
our Parliamentary Assembly. With no presumption of listing
them in order of importance, I
will mention just a few of them: the rapid deterioration of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, the
increased tensions in South Caucasus leading to this year’s
conflict, the migration and refugee
crisis, the crisis of Europe, Brexit, and rising nationalism all over the continent, the rise and
fall of ISIS and the related phenomenon of foreign terrorist fighters and the gradual shift from
large-scale to lone wolves terrorist attacks, a failed coup
d’état in Turkey, an undermined public
trust in some key democratic systems such as the US, political unrest in many participating
States, including now Belarus, major setbacks on universally accepted human rights and
fundamental freedoms throughout the whole OSCE area. More in general, and also as a
consequence of the above, a growing polarization of east-west relations alongside shrinking
trust and a notable degree of international cooperation fatigue, seriously undermining
multilateralism worldwide. And now, in addition, one of the biggest crises of the century: the
outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is radically changing our way of operating and,
to a certain extent, of living.
All of these major events, together with many others, contributed to shape our work as we kept
being flexible and adapted our action to what is
happening in the world around us. We do not
have a blueprint of what to do in all these cases. We have always tried to react promptly trying
to ask ourselves some fundamental questions such as “how
should we react?”,
“how
can we
contribute?”,
in each of these challenging circumstances
“where
is the specific added value of
parliamentarians and of the Parliamentary Assembly representing more than 1 billion
people?”
These questions bring me to directly address my work inside the OSCE Parliamentary
Assembly, and in this regard, I wish to recall the document I presented last year to the
Bureau, named “Triple
A: Assessment, Adaptation, Advancement
–
an Organization on the
move”,
which sums up very well the reforms I tried
to implement over the past five years. On
the political side, I wish to underline two key issues: the successful efforts towards
establishing what is now an excellent cooperation with the OSCE Government Representatives
in Vienna and the
Organization’s
executive structures, with regular coordination at all levels
on programmatic activities, positions and statements, truly providing a distinct parliamentary
added value in the framework of the wider “OSCE family”
product; and the adaptation of our