Thoughts from the OSCE Ministerial Council

I commend the Lithuanian Chairmanship in Office which has pursued a challenging agenda for the OSCE this year and I hope this Ministerial Council will both consolidate their excellent efforts and commit to realising future positive change across the OSCE area and beyond.

I take a very keen interest in what has been happening in Belarus. As an OSCE member they should be upholding the highest standards of democracy and human rights – but they are failing horribly in this. The OSCE’s work is crucial in bringing Belarus’s failings to light. If it weren’t for the OSCE ODIHR election monitoring mission, we would never have had a clear picture of the flawed way in which the Presidential election was conducted last December. Given our concerns about the brutal crackdown that followed the election, we were one of 14 OSCE states to invoke the so-called “Moscow Mechanism,” which resulted in a lengthy OSCE report cataloguing a huge number of human rights violations in Belarus. At this Council I’ll be pushing for Belarus to sit up and listen to the OSCE’s recommendations.

My best wishes go to Ireland as the next OSCE Chairmanship in Office. I know they will work hard on behalf of us all to promote OSCE action and intervention across their ambitious but realistic agenda and I assure them of our support.