The 22nd OSCE Ministerial Council Meeting in Belgrade – An Anniversary Without Celebration – Stephanie Liechtenstein
Title: The 22nd OSCE Ministerial Council Meeting in Belgrade – An Anniversary Without Celebration
Author: Stephanie Liechtenstein
Abstract
This article analyses the outcome of the 22nd OSCE Ministerial Council (MC) meeting, held in Belgrade on 3 and 4 December 2015, the year that the OSCE celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act, its founding document. The article argues that the MC meeting was characterized by entrenched positions and that it illustrated the distrust and deep divides among the 57 OSCE participating States. The article explains that the negotiation process was overshadowed by the ongoing Ukraine crisis and by a number of bilateral conflicts between states. The author specifies some of the bilateral conflicts and shows how they took direct influence on the negotiation process and how they led to the fall of important draft documents. As a result, the Belgrade MC adopted only 5 declarations, among them on combating violent extremism and radicalization and on combating illicit drug trafficking.
Keywords
OSCE Ministerial Council in Belgrade – Serbian OSCE Chairmanship – Ukraine crisis – East West relations – relations between Ukraine and Russia – Helsinki Final Act – migration – anti-terrorism – OSCE multilateral negotiations – inter-linkage – Helsinki+40 process – countering violent extremism – Transdniestria – protracted conflicts
Metadata
Title: The 22nd OSCE Ministerial Council Meeting in Belgrade – An Anniversary Without Celebration
Author: Stephanie Liechtenstein
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/18750230-02602003
Language: English
Year: 2015
Volume: 26
Issue: 2–4
Pages: 337–349
In: Security and Human Rights
E-ISSN: 1875-0230