St Gallen — The OSCE’s first major conference under the Swiss chairmanship convened in St Gallen on 9 and 10 February, on a subject the organisation has committed itself to fighting for two decades and is currently failing to contain: antisemitism, at levels not recorded in the OSCE region in generations. Chair-in-Office Ignazio Cassis opened […]
Kyiv — The OSCE’s chairman-in-office and secretary general travelled to Kyiv on 2 February, carrying a message carefully balanced between solidarity and readiness: the organisation stands with Ukraine, and stands prepared to deploy in support of any ceasefire — whenever, and if, diplomacy produces one. Ignazio Cassis and Feridun Sinirlioğlu met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and […]
Vienna — Switzerland assumed the chairmanship of the OSCE on 1 January and presented its programme to the Permanent Council on 15 January, becoming the first country to lead the organisation three times — after 1996 and 2014 — and doing so with a motto that reads like a diagnosis: when diplomacy seems impossible, it […]
Vienna — The OSCE’s thirty-second Ministerial Council closed in the Hofburg on 5 December, ending Finland’s chairmanship year with the organisation’s gaze fixed on a prospect that would have seemed fantasy twelve months ago: planning for a possible ceasefire in Ukraine. The meeting on 4 and 5 December drew more than 1,200 participants to Vienna […]
Chișinău — International observers said Moldova’s parliamentary election was competitive and well administered despite unprecedented foreign interference, illicit funding schemes, cyberattacks and disinformation — a verdict delivered on Monday, the day after voters handed President Maia Sandu’s party a renewed parliamentary majority. The 28 September vote was watched by 391 observers from 50 countries — […]
Vienna — The OSCE announced on Monday the formal dissolution of the Minsk Group and its related structures, closing a peace process that ran for more than three decades — and ending it at the joint request of Armenia and Azerbaijan, signed at the White House three weeks earlier. The two countries’ appeal to dissolve […]
Helsinki — Fifty years to the week after 35 leaders signed the Helsinki Final Act in this city, more than a thousand people from 70 countries gathered in Finlandia Hall on 31 July to ask what remains of it. Russia, a signatory’s successor state, was not represented — and marked the anniversary, Ukraine’s foreign minister […]
Vienna — Finland assumed the chairmanship of the OSCE this month, presenting its priorities to the Permanent Council in a year freighted with symbolism: 2025 marks fifty years since the Helsinki Final Act was signed in the Finnish capital, and Finland now chairs the organisation the Act created — as a NATO member, with the […]
Valletta — Malta closed its year at the helm of the OSCE with a Ministerial Council on 5 and 6 December, passing the chairmanship to Finland at the end of twelve months in which keeping the organisation functioning was itself the achievement. Foreign Minister Ian Borg had taken the job in January under no illusions. […]
Tbilisi — International observers delivered a carefully balanced verdict on Georgia’s parliamentary election on Sunday: a vote that offered real choice but took place on an uneven playing field, marked by pressure and tension. By Monday, their statement had become the central document in a fight over whether the result can stand. The 26 October […]
Skopje — The OSCE closed its thirtieth Ministerial Council on 1 December with something it has rarely managed lately: decisions. Ministers and envoys in Skopje confirmed Malta as chair for 2024 and extended the mandates of the organisation’s four top officials by nine months — keeping the institution functioning for another year in a war […]
Stepanakert — An OSCE needs-assessment mission crossed into Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday, the organisation’s first visit to the region in some thirty years — and found almost nobody left to assess. In the week since Azerbaijan’s military operation of 19 September, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians, effectively the entire population of the enclave, have fled to […]
Ankara — International observers delivered their verdict on Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections on Monday: a hard-fought, technically well-run vote played out on a tilted field, in a country that turned out in enormous numbers and now faces two more weeks of campaign before a presidential runoff. Some 401 observers from 40 countries — deployed […]
Vienna — An OSCE expert mission has documented the forced deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia in a report concluding that the practice is widespread, systematic and organised from the top of the Russian state — the same conclusion the International Criminal Court reached when it issued arrest warrants in March. The third […]
Vienna — North Macedonia took over the chairmanship of the OSCE this month, becoming the smallest country to lead Europe’s largest security organisation — and inheriting an institution that has not had a properly agreed budget since 2021. Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani presented his country’s priorities to the Permanent Council in Vienna on 12 January, […]
Łódź — The OSCE’s twenty-ninth Ministerial Council ended in Łódź on 2 December with Sergey Lavrov addressing a half-emptied hall, no consensus on a declaration, and one unmistakable signal of how the organisation’s map is being redrawn: Estonia’s candidacy to chair in 2024 was blocked by Russia. Poland, this year’s chair, declined to accredit the […]
Vienna — The OSCE has condemned the sentencing of two of its former Ukrainian staff members to thirteen years in prison by a court in the Russia-backed ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’, calling the proceedings a political theatre and demanding the men’s immediate release. Dmytro Shabanov, a former security assistant to the organisation’s monitoring mission, and Maksym […]
Birmingham — The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly closed its annual session in Birmingham this week with a declaration supporting the creation of a special international tribunal to prosecute the crime of aggression against Ukraine — filling the jurisdictional gap that shields a permanent member of the UN Security Council from the International Criminal Court on that […]
Vienna — A panel of independent experts established under the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism has found clear patterns of violations of international humanitarian law by Russian forces in Ukraine, in a report that catalogues attacks on hospitals, schools, homes and the theatre in Mariupol where hundreds of civilians had sheltered. The report, published on 13 April, […]
Vienna — The OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine formally ended on 31 March after Russia refused to join consensus on extending its mandate, closing down the largest field operation in the organisation’s history eight years and one day after it began. The mission, launched on 21 March 2014 as Russian forces consolidated their hold […]
Kyiv — The OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, the unarmed observation force that has been the international community’s eyes on the war in the east for eight years, began evacuating its international staff this week as Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country. The mission’s last daily report before the escalation, covering 22 […]
Stockholm — Foreign ministers of the OSCE’s 57 participating states gathered in Stockholm this week with one subject overshadowing everything else: the Russian military build-up along Ukraine’s borders, and whether Europe’s largest security organisation can still do the job it was built for. The meeting, on 2 and 3 December under Sweden’s chairmanship, brought Russian […]
Vienna — Thousands of migrants remain trapped in freezing conditions on the Belarusian-Polish border this weekend, as the OSCE comes under pressure to find a role in a crisis that sits squarely in its territory and largely outside its tools. The standoff at the Kuźnica crossing and nearby forest strips, where people — many of […]
Warsaw — The OSCE’s election observation office has cancelled its mission to Russia’s parliamentary elections next month, after Moscow imposed restrictions on the number of observers and the length of their stay that the office says make meaningful monitoring impossible. ODIHR had planned to send a full mission for the 17–19 September State Duma vote, […]
Tirana — The OSCE closed its twenty-seventh Ministerial Council on Friday with the appointment it had been unable to make for months: new leadership for the organisation’s four top posts, ending a vacancy crisis that had left the institution rudderless through one of the most turbulent years in its history. Meeting online under Albania’s chairmanship […]
Vienna — An independent expert report commissioned under the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism has concluded that Belarus committed massive and systematic human rights violations around its disputed presidential election, and recommended that the vote be annulled and new elections held under international supervision. The report, published on 5 November, was written by Professor Wolfgang Benedek of […]
