III Osce
| Date | 01 June 2005 |
| Published date | 01 June 2005 |
| Author | Arie Bloed |
| DOI | 10.1177/016934410502300207 |
| Subject Matter | Part B: Human Rights News |
286
III OSCE
ARIE BLOED
OSCE IS AGAIN IN A BUDGET CRISIS
The OSCE is going through another difficult phase in its existence and had to start
the new year 2005 without an approved budget and a serious disagreement about
the future of the organisation. The Ministerial meeting in Sofia in December 2004
did not bring any substantial breakthrough in any of the major outstanding issues
and, therefore, had to be concluded without a formal concluding document. This
was the second time already, since also the Maastricht Ministerial in December 2003
faced the same fate. There, the Russian Federation blocked a ministerial document
because the draft text included a number of issues which it does not want to accept
any longer, including a reference to Russia’s 1999 Istanbul commitments, which
obliged the country to withdraw its troops from Georgia and Moldova.
The main outstanding issues concern the ‘reform’ of the organisation. This issue
has become a ticking time bomb, since the Russians have made it clear that without a
reform, corresponding to their wishes, they would not consent to progress in other
areas and would block the adoption of a budget for the year 2005. The Russians,
officially backed by a number of more authoritarian Commonwealth of the
Independent States (CIS) countries, but in practice mainly by Belarus, are of the
opinion that the OSCE suffers from serious ‘unbalances’ in its work. These
unbalances are both geographical and thematic: they accuse the organization to
focus mainly on the former socialist countries and to have a disproportionate
attention for human dimension issues. Therefore, the proposal is to pay much more
attention to the political-security and economic issues. Another issue is OSCE’s
important work in the area of election monitoring which is becoming an
increasingly delicate issue after the Rose and Orange ‘revolutions’ in Georgia and
Ukraine and the unexpected ousting of the Kyrgyz regime under former President
Akaev. The CIS is now having its own ‘election monitoring organisation’ which is
active in the field and recently also in Ukraine. In contrast to the OSCE observers
which considered the first and second round of the presidential elections in Ukraine
to be not free and fair, the CIS observers praised the democratic character of these
elections and endorsed the victory of the former Prime Minister Yanukovich. The
OSCE election monitoring, conducted by the relatively autonomous Office for
Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the OSCE in Warsaw, is clearly a target
in the Russian efforts to ‘reform’ the OSCE by bringing ODIHR’s activities fully
under the control of the participating States, in other words: thanks to the
consensus-principle more under Russian control. Another contentious issue is the
functioning of OSCE’s missions which – in Russian view – focus too strongly on
political and human rights issues, also thanks to the fact that the missions have
discretionary powers over the voluntary contributions of participating States. The
Russian Federation wants that these voluntary contributions should become part of
OSCE’s unified budget and, therefore, will come under full control of the countries
To continue reading
Request your trial