For NGOs, Clouds Gather over OSCE Astana Summit

Concerns about access and conditions for NGOs at the OSCE Review Conference are starting to mount as events unfold at the first part of the RevCon in Warsaw this past week.

Two NGO activists from Turkmenistan have waited more than two days and have still not been registered for the conference, due to an objection to their presence by the government of Turkmenistan -- itself not present at the meeting as part of a long-standing boycott of the OSCE human rights meetings where states and NGOs are able to sit at the table side by side and share the speakers'list. Despite ambassadors' objections on a point of order from the U.S., EU, Canada and Norway in the meeting, reinforced by high-level protests by these countries, the decision to admit the two has been trapped in a vicious circle caused by a procedure created in July by the Permanent Council of the OSCE under PC DEC 952 to adjudicate disputes from states about admission of NGOs to the RevCon.

[UPDATE:  One activist was finally granted his registration today; the other was still waiting.]

An NGO coalition including Russian, Kazakh, and international NGOs such as Freedom House that booked hotel rooms and a conference venue for a parallel meeting after the OSCE summit was suddenly notified by the Kazakh government that their reservation has been cancelled. In several meetings, Kazakh officials have openly challenged NGOs, warning them not to engage in "defamation of the state," aggressively demanding the floor in side meetings to refute NGOs protests about human rights violations, and in a tactic seen more often in the Soviet era than in recent years, deploying in the meetings various GONGOs or government-organized NGOs who echo the Kazakh state line and attack their more independently-minded citizens.

The net effect is to expose a profound challenge to a core component of OSCE meetings successfully faced in the days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, namely that NGOs can participate meaningfully and fully in the meetings with states, making their concerns known without obstacle.

Western diplomats have met this challenge vigorously in intervention after intervention, and there are hopes that in the course of the three meetings  through December, it will be possible to secure conditions for full participation of NGOs -- which involves a long list of modalities regarding everything from hotel bookings to transportation to the capital of Astana, which is expected to be under high security.

Precisely because the tactics of the Kazakh chair and their allies have been to use procedural details and technicalities to derail principles, maintaining the Helsinki space will require great stamina and repeated reiterations of past precedent -- and unfortunately, likely some compromises on some matters unless ultimately there is a decision for some not to participate in the summit at all to avoid cooptation.

I am serving as a public member of the U.S. government delegation to the OSCE regarding media freedom issues. (The views presented in my blog do not represent the official views of the U.S. delegation) As always at the OSCE meetings, it is heartening to see that our government takes very seriously any threat to NGO access, and diplomats have been constantly raising the issues both in the sessions and in talks with other delegations and the chair.