Where Differences Can Be Heard: Fundamental Freedoms Debated at OSCE Warsaw

Media-Society.com // At the Warsaw Human Dimension Conference, ODIHR brought governments, civil society and minority voices into the same room to debate protest rights, surveillance, religious freedom and civic space — demonstrating the value of open dialogue even where perspectives sharply diverge.

Peaceful protest, digital surveillance, religious freedom and pressure on civil society converged during a wide-ranging plenary at the 2026 Warsaw Human Dimension Conference.

WARSAW, 7 October 2026 — What does freedom of assembly mean when a demonstrator can be followed not only through the streets but through facial recognition, databases and digital platforms? And what does freedom of religion or association mean when an organisation may remain formally legal while being marginalised through stigma, hostile labelling or institutional pressure?

Those questions ran through Wednesday’s “Fundamental Freedoms I” plenary at the Warsaw Human Dimension Conference, where representatives of governments and civil society examined peaceful assembly and association, human rights defenders, national human rights institutions and freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.

The session brought together issues that are often discussed separately but are increasingly difficult to disentangle: protest, surveillance, journalism, minority rights, religious freedom, civil-society space and the capacity of institutions to translate human-rights commitments into practice.

Two public squares: physical and digital

Albanian lawyer and former Ombudsperson Erinda Ballanca, delivering the introductory remarks, used recent demonstrations in Albania as a starting point for a broader examination of contemporary protest.

Her central proposition was striking: modern demonstrations increasingly take place in two public squares at once — one physical and one digital.

A protester may face police restrictions or crowd-control measures in the street while simultaneously being photographed, identified, tracked or scrutinised through digital technologies. Activists, journalists and independent organisations also rely on online platforms to organise, communicate and document events, meaning that restrictions imposed in the digital sphere can have consequences for what happens in the physical one.

The issue received particular resonance on Wednesday because ODIHR also launched a new publication on the surveillance of peaceful assemblies.

The report warns that rapidly developing technologies are expanding the capacity of authorities to track, monitor and identify participants in public gatherings. It argues that transparency, independent monitoring and effective oversight are increasingly important as artificial intelligence, advanced image analysis and remote identification become part of the policing environment.

The technological question is therefore no longer simply whether surveillance takes place, but how powerful it is, who controls it, how long information is retained and what safeguards exist against abuse.

The right to protest — and the right to observe

Journalists and independent monitors also emerged as an important part of the discussion.

Ballanca argued that those documenting demonstrations should not be treated merely as bystanders. Their presence can provide an independent record of what occurred and may become particularly important when authorities and protesters later offer conflicting versions of events.

The point goes beyond the safety of journalists themselves.

A society in which citizens retain the formal right to demonstrate but reporters cannot effectively document what happens during a demonstration faces a different, and potentially deeper, problem.

The question becomes not only whether people are free to assemble, but whether the wider public remains free to see what happens when they do.

Security systems and transnational repression

The potential intersection between technology and repression was also raised by Statewatch, which turned attention to international passenger-data systems developed primarily for security and counter-terrorism purposes.

Its representative warned of vulnerabilities that may arise when information originating in authoritarian states enters interconnected systems used by other governments.

The concern raised was that politically motivated information, security designations or automated risk assessments could potentially affect human rights defenders travelling internationally.

It illustrated a recurring dilemma during the plenary: a technology or database may have a legitimate security purpose while still creating opportunities for abuse when oversight, transparency and remedies are inadequate.

Western Thrace: sharply different accounts

Some of the most visibly contrasting interventions concerned the Muslim and Turkish minority in Western Thrace, Greece.

A representative of the Friendship, Equality and Peace Party referred to longstanding disputes involving minority associations whose names contain the word “Turkish”, and invoked judgments of the European Court of Human Rights which, according to the intervention, have yet to be fully implemented.

A representative of the Association of Religious Officials of the Mosques of Xanthi Prefecture separately criticised state involvement in the selection of religious leadership and argued that minority communities should be able to recognise leaders chosen by their own members.

But another speaker from the Muslim minority presented a substantially different account, describing coexistence between Christians and Muslims positively and warning instead about the influence of unofficial or external actors.

The plenary did not adjudicate between those competing descriptions.

That is an important distinction. Statements delivered by governments, NGOs and civil-society representatives in an OSCE plenary are interventions by those speakers; their inclusion in the conference record does not in itself transform disputed claims into institutional findings.

What the exchange did demonstrate was one of the distinctive characteristics of the Human Dimension Conference: markedly different accounts of the same human-rights environment can be placed directly before participating States and civil society.

Religious freedom beyond non-interference

The Bahá’í International Community approached freedom of religion or belief from another direction.

Its representative argued that religious freedom should not be understood solely as protection against state interference or discrimination. It should also create the conditions in which people can bring their convictions into public life and contribute constructively to society.

That conception moves the discussion from mere coexistence towards participation.

Rather than communities simply occupying the same society beside one another, the speaker called for sustained spaces in which people holding different convictions can develop relationships and cooperate.

A representative of the youth organisation Your Future similarly appealed for deeper human contact across political and religious divides while reflecting on the significance of 7 October, the victims of the 2023 Hamas attacks and the devastating conflict that followed.

The intervention warned against the normalisation of antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred, hostility towards Christians and other forms of dehumanisation, arguing that dialogue does not require people to abandon strongly held political or religious positions.

When stigma becomes a restriction

Several interventions also examined forms of pressure on civil society that do not begin with an outright prohibition.

Representatives of ALLATRA alleged that stigmatizing narratives originating in Russia had travelled across borders through media, private actors and institutions. They urged participants to consider the point at which hostile labelling and disinformation begin to create real institutional consequences for organisations.

The broader principle extended well beyond that particular case.

Civil-society space can contract without an organisation formally being outlawed. Labels portraying groups as foreign-controlled, dangerous, illegitimate or socially suspect can affect access to institutions, employment, banking, public contracts, media treatment or the willingness of others to associate with them.

That makes reputation itself a potential terrain of human-rights pressure — while also placing a responsibility on journalists and institutions to distinguish substantiated information from contested characterisations.

Institutions that need more than independence on paper

The role of national human rights institutions provided another strand of the discussion.

Ballanca described such bodies as a bridge between citizens and the state: institutions capable of investigating complaints, advising governments and parliaments, educating the public and assessing whether human-rights obligations are being implemented.

But formal existence is not sufficient.

An ombudsperson or national human-rights body without adequate resources, practical independence or meaningful government follow-up risks becoming an institution whose findings carry little consequence.

Uzbekistan used its intervention to describe developments in its own national human-rights architecture, including the Ombudsperson, the Children’s Ombudsperson and the National Centre for Human Rights, highlighting reforms that it said had expanded monitoring capacity and regional presence.

Religion, heritage and war

Freedom of religion or belief also entered the plenary through interventions concerning Turkey and Ukraine.

A representative of the Order of Saint Andrew the Apostle referred to the longstanding closure of the Halki Theological Seminary and the status of Hagia Sophia, presenting both as issues affecting the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Orthodox Christian heritage. The speaker also pointed to recent contacts that have raised cautious expectations regarding a possible reopening of Halki.

Ukraine placed religious freedom within the context of Russia’s war and occupation.

Its representative accused Russian authorities of applying extremism and terrorism legislation against peaceful religious activity in occupied Ukrainian territories and referred to attacks on clergy and religious buildings.

The Ukrainian delegation called for access by international monitoring mechanisms and argued that religious freedom must encompass not only the existence of churches or places of worship, but the practical ability of believers to practise their religion without imprisonment, intimidation or violence.

These claims, like other contested allegations presented during the plenary, remain attributable to the delegation making them rather than constituting findings reached by the conference itself.

From commitments to implementation

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Wednesday’s plenary was how difficult it became to place the different freedoms discussed into separate compartments.

Freedom of assembly now intersects with data protection and digital surveillance.

Freedom of association can be affected by stigma even when an organisation has never been formally banned.

Freedom of religion or belief involves not only worship but autonomy, identity, equality and participation.

And human rights defenders increasingly operate in an environment in which the physical and digital worlds have become inseparable.

The challenge facing OSCE participating States is therefore not merely to reaffirm commitments negotiated in an earlier technological age.

It is to determine how those commitments apply in a world of facial recognition, biometric identification, algorithmic profiling, interconnected databases, online mobilisation and information campaigns capable of crossing borders almost instantly.

ODIHR’s new surveillance study makes that challenge particularly concrete. It describes contemporary surveillance technologies as a significant change in the scale and capacity available to law-enforcement authorities and stresses the importance of independent scrutiny.

The Warsaw plenary produced no single resolution to the disputes raised — nor was that its purpose.

But across interventions that frequently disagreed with one another, one underlying question kept returning:

When fundamental freedoms are placed under pressure, are the institutions meant to protect them capable of making those freedoms real?

That may ultimately be the more important test of the OSCE’s human-dimension commitments — not that they exist on paper, but that they continue to work when circumstances change.