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.
July Agreement on Adjudication of NGO Admission Used to Delay Registration
A paragraph at the very end of the 8-page DEC 952 on the agenda and modalities merely reiterates the language used at the last OSCE summit in 1999 in Istanbul, referencing the 1992 Helsinki document in Chapter IV, paragraphs 15-16, that the only grounds for rejection of any individual or NGO would be their advocacy or use of violence or terrorism. Yet language in DEC 952 about the possibility for the Secretary General to consult with ODIHR and interested state parties regarding NGO admission has been interpreted by the Kazakh chair-in-office to mean that the chair itself cannot render a judgement but the SG has to decide -- a maneuver that enabled the Kazakh delegation yesterday to tell the two Turkmen activists that while Kazakhstan had no objection to their registration, Turkmenistan did, and therefore "consultations" had to ensue.
This opens up the unpleasant prospect of rejections of the applications of NGOs on specious grounds merely because they are disliked by their government, and a war of attrition as consultations with interested parties drags on.
The U.S. and other Western delegations have rejected this interpretation of 952, based on past OSCE practice, yet despite the secretariat's obligation to provide an answer regarding rejection of application requests within 48 hours, the two activists are still cooling their heels in the marble lobby of the Sofitel Hotel Victoria waiting for an answer. Hopefully by the end of the week, or in time for participation in the next stage of the RevCon in Vienna, this case will be resolved, but obviously delegates are wishing to put down a marker on this early to prevent abuse of 952 to block legitimate NGO participation.
Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Central Asia
Because this is a summit year, the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting is replaced by the Review Conference, but unlike past summits, it is spread over three cities (not two) -- Warsaw, Vienna, and Astana, due to the complex negotiations over even having a summit in the first place, and a late decision about it at a ministerial in July. Already, the sprawling event and late availability of the agenda with the topic schedule have been daunting to NGOs, some of whom have been uncertain where best to spend their limited resources. There is the impression that there are less NGOs than in past meetings, although a final list of participants has simply not been available, one of the troubling signs of the differing modalities between the ODIHR-run meetings and those run by the Vienna secretariat of OSCE. Some activists have said that the Kazakh government brought as many as 40 GONGOs or pro-government groups with their delegation, but this has not been possible to check without the final list public -- certainly there are quite a number of NGOs who have been found to support the Kazakh formula for first ensuring state-driven economic progress, then adding on more democracy and media freedom later so it will not disrupt those in power.
NGOs have responded to the challenges by making joint, omnibus statements, where groups of 6 or 10 organizations, international and regional, focus on their common concerns, such as a statement read by Belarusian human rights leader Ales Bialatski about mistreatment of human rights defenders throughout the OSCE region, particularly in Central Asia, and a statement prepared by the Bulgarian, Moscow, Dutch, Norwegian, and Polish Helsinki groups, the Stockholm-based Civil Rights Defenders and others about the oppressive conditions for human rights advocates in Central Asia, particularly in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and the grave attacks on those attempting to document the atrocities in southern Kyrgyzstan this past June.
Sitting in the sessions, or even in the various cafes and lounges where TV screens with the speakers are available, you hear that many of the NGO speeches are in Russian, the lingua-franca of Eurasia, as the groups that have the most serious human rights concerns and no other outlet (such as the Council of Europe or EU) to raise them, come to the OSCE. And from the podiums of the side events, we are increasingly hearing NGO leaders call into question the very viability of the organization itself, as it has been struggling to meet the challenges of a considerable rollback in the hard-won consensus about human rights begun in Helsinki in 1975. The close integration of the three "baskets"of Helsinki of security and cooperation have been disconnected, and other processes such as the fall of the USSR and subsequent independence of post-Soviet states, the EU accession procedures have replaced the human rights "basket" for many of the Helsinki countries. As one Kazakh speaker pointed out, that leaves Central Asia (and I would add Belarus) "left behind"as the only area with serious third-basket issues. -- and increasing misgivings by some that it is "worth it"to keep pursuing these goals through OSCE. That is, while any one participating state, including the U.S., can develop serious problems such as torture, the solution to them does not necessarily lie through the OSCE multilateral process rather than through the EU and Council of Europe, or unilateral or bilateral approaches and mechanisms.
Polarized Atmosphere
The atmospherics in some of the meetings have been most dismaying. As the Kazakh government representatives attack domestic NGOs in the official sessions, some of them respond by interrupting the speaker and being declared out of order, not helping their cause.
Yesterday at a side event organized by the Foundation for Open Dialogue, a Polish NGO, and representatives of the independent press and a political party in Kazakhstan, there was a disturbing scene that revealed the polarity already evident between some civic groups in Kazakhstan and the authoritarian Kazakh government and their supporters. When the event had already begun and a Polish speaker was drawing the lessons to be learned from Poland's Solidarity, suddenly a Kazakh ambassador stormed into the room and began berating the organizers for not giving the government delegation a floor, angrily noting that the Kazakh government had already created a platform for dialogue between the government and NGOs, and implying that should be sufficient. The Kazakh diplomat was indignant that the NGO moderator had said that he would not give the government representatives the floor in the meeting, because the event was structured as a dialogue between Kazakh and Polish civic leaders and the speakers' list was packed.
Some Western diplomats present felt that the NGOs had left themselves vulnerable to criticism by states in not structuring the meeting so that there was ample time for questions and answers from any person from a state or NGO delegation. The incident might have been handled better by the NGO organizers by urging the Kazakh diplomat to take a seat and wait for the Q&A after the NGO presentations, rather than insisting on keeping the government out.
The problem is that when we insist on Roberts Rules of Orders in a climate where the state is shutting down newspapers, turning off Live Journal blogs on the Internet, arresting a journalist and keeping the top human rights advocate Yevgeny Zhovtis in jail, the space for independent commentary has so shrunk, that NGOs feel they need the space an OSCE side meeting affords to present their case and get support from the international community. The impression is that the issue for the Kazakh government isn't *really* the technicality of getting on the speaker's list, but being able to confront and undermine the very idea of independent organizing itself.
The organizers said they were concerned that if they opened up the floor, the list would be flooded with GONGOs bent on disrupting the meeting. Indeed, when some 15 minutes were provided at the end to ask questions, several pro-government speakers used the opportunity to denounce the independent media, claiming their concerns were false, as there were numerous papers in Kazakhstan to read. A representative of a party that had not been registered by the government said wearily that he refused to debate groups he felt were "puppets," he would prefer to address the government directly -- but then he, like the papers that have been banned, should be legitimized through registration.
It is all reminiscent of the breakthrough of the round table in Poland initiating dialogue between the authorities and Solidarity back in the 1980s which became possible only when the state first recognized Solidarity's registration as a labor movement.
We are very far from such validation in Kazakhstan, and getting to that position where government and civil society interlocutors are treated as equal partners in a civil society will require considerable work and concerted and principled positions.
No Room at the Inn in Astana
A second side event in the evening was even more disturbing as the dynamics again played out between the Kazakh chair, bent on resisting or coopting NGOs, and a group of parallel-summit organizers struggling to hold their ground.
Yuri Dzhibladze of the Center for Development of Democracy in Moscow and a number of international groups including Civicus and Freedom House described their plans for focusing strategically on several of the most important topics of the OSCE process such as human rights defenders, and conflict prevention and creating a consolidated and coherent document to submit to the official summit so that the voice of NGOs would resound there for the record (as in past summits, NGOs will not be given speakers' slots, but individual state delegations can note their concerns).
Yet Dzhibladze announced that only three hours before the groups' side event opened, they were informed by Kazakh authorities that their hotel booking in a small hotel in Astana, where they had only been able to get 70 rooms in any event, had been cancelled, and that all bookings would have to go through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This meant that the effort to find and create an independent venue for NGOs in the heavily-controlled setting of Astana had just collapsed.
A Kazakh diplomat who had come to the meeting took the floor at great length (despite the moderators' insistence on a one-minute rule for interventions in the packed meeting). She proceeded to harangue the groups organizing the independent parallel meetings, with her remarks essentially amounting to an implication that they should have cleared their plans and ideas through the Kazakh chair.
The NGOs stood their ground. One by one they said that given OSCE commitments in the past to conditions for NGOs, they believed they should be able to freely move around the country, enter the city where the summit venue was, rent hotel accommodations and conference venue space, and independently hold their meeting without state interference.
Invoking the "cooperation"mantra, and saying again that the state had already organized the approved civil society "dialogue"and displayed "tolerance"to NGOs by their lights, startingly, the Kazakh delegate in the end loudly proclaimed that the NGO organizers had used "violence"(nasiliye) against the government, leaving Dzhibladze and the other leaders gasping in amazement that...booking a hotel room could in any conceivable way be construed as "violent". It seemed an ominous reference to the reason that states can invoke non-admission of NGOs under 952 and related OSCE documents.
Dzhibladze vowed to appeal the cancellation of the reservation to the Foreign Ministry, and NGOs began to actively discuss in the corridors whether in fact they were welcome in Astana before, during or after the summit. Concerns began to be raised about the many exiles or persons with refugee status who come to these meetings -- would they run the risk of arrest and even extradition back to the countries where they might face torture? A picket of Uzbeks outside the hotel entrance protesting Kazakhstan's extradition of Uzbek refugees back to Uzbekistan was a sober reminder of the distinct possibility.
Even if the parallel summit is permitted, with only 70 seats and an invitation-only regimen, and with heavy costs and possible Internet interference making difficult something like Livestream or Ustream ( to broadcast the event in real time and enable participants from around the world to make comments in the real-time chat), the space for NGOs in a meeting of some 5,000-6,000 delegates from states looks meager indeed. (By contrast more than 9,000 people converged on Istanbul). The U.S. and other delegations are already working hard to try to secure better conditions but as with many other issues in the last year, the Kazakh chair is not off to a good start here in Warsaw.
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