Since I first saw a local Polish emigre folk dance group as a child, Poland has held great sense of romance for me. More recently, cycling and skiing along mountain border paths through fairy tale forests added to the magic. Warsaw though has always been for me a city of buildings. Buildings stretching along broad avenues as far as the eye can see.
But a visit to Warsaw this week for me was all about people. Multilateral diplomacy may sometimes appear to be concerned primarily with paper: declarations, reports, resolutions, treaties, memoranda and so on. Such documents can be important, but only have sense and meaning if we keep in sight the human realities underlying the words.
The annual Warsaw Human Dimension conference, HDIM, does just this, bringing under one roof diplomats, NGOs and experts from the 57 OSCE states.
The Human Dimension is the ‘third basket’ of issues of the comprehensive security and cooperation remit of the OSCE. In it we address the fundamental rights and freedoms that are essential building blocks of healthy societies and the international rules based order, guided by the1975 Helsinki Declaration – perhaps one of the most important diplomatic papers of our age.
I took part in discussions on freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. I met experts on minorities, media freedom, Roma and Sinti issues, democratic elections. My apprehension at discussion of the abstract sounding ‘gender issues’ was misplaced: inspiring women tackling serious, real life problems common to our region and beyond found more common ground than cause for confrontation.
Confrontation was a feature of discussion of rights that some within our region sadly interpret as a threat. But the verbal confrontation has a place and purpose too. It would be wrong of the OSCE to fight shy of difficult or divisive issues. The Russian Federation will again go away in no doubt of the strength of condemnation of its illegal annexation of Crimea, its illegal detention of Ukrainian citizens or its increasing domestic restrictions on civil society. A dignified silent protest highlighted detention of human rights defenders in Azerbaijan.
There is so much potential in this forum that we could harness with determination and political will and in concert with the OSCE’s dedicated three institutions (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, High Commissioner on National Minorities, and Representative on Freedom of the Media). I hope that we can continue to build on this foundation and exploit the full promise of this force for positive change.
For now one thing is certain. In Warsaw the conference lobby will be filled from dawn to long beyond dusk with the babble of human chatter, giving diplomacy a very human dimension indeed.
Image credit: Andrew Peebles