OSCE Annual Meeting in Vienna – Austrian government remains steadfast

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) convened for its annual session in Vienna on 23-24 February 2023. The Assembly is made up of 323 parliamentarians from Vancouver to Vladivostok.

At its annual session in 2023, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly held a debate on the one-sidedly formulated topic “One year later: Russia’s continued full-scale war on Ukraine”, with speeches by several OSCE Special Representatives. Instead of being willing to listen to Russia’s point of view as well, 81 parliamentarians from 20 countries recently had written to the Austrian federal government demanding to “prevent the Russian delegation from attending the OSCE meeting in Vienna”. Austria should not issue visas to Russian (and Belarussian) MPs who are under Western sanctions, the senders said.

“International law must be respected, even if it is not popular”

The Austrian government, however, was not dissuaded from its lawful course. On 3 February Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg told a committee of the National Council that Austria was obliged under international law to issue visas and that he would certainly not break the law. International law must be respected, even if this is not popular.¹
  This position was also confirmed by the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly itself. According to the press, it stated that the Headquarters Agreement requires Austria to facilitate the entry of participating delegations, “which means that the issuing of visas is not a matter of discretion but a matter of legal obligation”.²
  In an interview with ORF, Foreign Minister Schallenberg also pointed out the importance that should be attached to the OSCE as a platform: “The OSCE has never been an organisation of like-minded people. [...] But we must remain in dialogue. Because at some point, diplomacy will hopefully be given space again.”
  This was followed by Lithuania’s dramatic threat to boycott the meeting because its delegation could not be expected to “sit in the same room with the people who should be tried by a special military tribunal because these people are directly responsible for starting the war”. To this, the Austrian Foreign Minister calmly commented that it was “a pity” that the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, which brings together parliamentarians from OSCE countries, was so “emotionally overloaded”, while the meeting of OSCE ambassadors was held every Tuesday in the Vienna Hofburg.³
  As a Swiss, one could almost become envious. Austria, which modelled its perpetual armed neutrality after the Second World War on that of Switzerland, is not dissuaded – despite EU membership! – from the path of neutrality and the rule of law. For the Austrian government, the duties of neutrality are apparently clear: do not supply weapons to Ukraine, no war transports through Austrian airspace and the duty, as a depositary state of the OSCE, to treat all member states equally. Perhaps we should send our foreign minister to Vienna for a while to be tutored? Because also the ICRC, which depends on the trust of all war and conflict parties for its beneficial humanitarian activities, must once again be able to rely on Switzerland’s neutrality as a depositary state.

“There must still be an organisation somewhere
where people can still talk to each other”

In the Echo der Zeit, Manfred Nowak, Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna, expressed the same opinion: As the seat of the OSCE, Vienna had concluded an “Austria-OSCE Headquarters Agreement” and was therefore obliged to grant all 57 members of the OSCE, including Russia and Belarus, the right to attend OSCE meetings in Vienna. This headquarters agreement should be weighted higher than the EU sanctions, for example the entry ban on Russian politicians and diplomats, Nowak said. Unlike the Council of Europe, the OSCE cannot exclude Russia, he said, because it does not provide for an exclusion mechanism: “This has to do with the fact that the OSCE [then CSCE] was founded in Helsinki in 1975, during the Cold War, to try to find a basis for talks between the US on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other, and the European states.”
  Professor Nowak would not advocate an exclusion clause in the United Nations either, “because there must still be an organisation somewhere where people can still talk to each other. Isolating Russia would also mean that there would no longer be any possibility of concluding peace, and for this, the OSCE is the most important international organisation alongside the UN, because it’s also about security and cooperation in Europe. And it’s about the OSCE, which also had a large observer mission in Ukraine, becoming a platform again where peace negotiations might also be made possible.”⁴

Looking Back: Weakening of the OSCE by the West (2020) – cui bono?

One can only agree with Manfred Nowak: The OSCE could play an important role in today’s terrible wars in Europe, such as in Ukraine or Nagorno-Karabakh, to bring the parties to the table. Could … As Current Concerns reported in August 2020, the NATO and EU states showed little interest in a strong OSCE even then. On the contrary, some of them, such as Norway and Canada, actively pursued the deselection of the energetic OSCE leadership crew, including Swiss Secretary General Thomas Greminger, who had proposed more effective instruments to de-escalate tensions between states.⁵
  One of these instruments was the observer mission mentioned by Professor Nowak, which was established after the coup on the Maidan in 2014. It recorded the violations of the ceasefire in the Donbass. Every single explosion was documented with a picture and exact time. The majority of these, as reported in 2020, came from the Ukrainian army. The fact that the observers were so impartial obviously went against the grain of some Western powers.
  In view of NATO’s advance to the Russian border, the massive expansion of its military potential in Eastern Europe and the creation of an enemy image of Russia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called on the OSCE to act as early as December 2019 at the OSCE Ministerial Meeting: “It is important to stop this dangerous trend and halt the further tendency towards confrontation. [...] The OSCE could and should play an important role in solving these tasks because of its vast geographical scope and all-encompassing approach to security, consensus principle and cultural dialogue.”⁶
  The CSCE/OSCE was founded as a forum for exchange and bridge-building between participating States with different political points of view. Allowing only the view of one side at the Parliamentary Assembly in Vienna may be in line with the will of the only superpower and today’s heated atmosphere, but certainly not with the basic idea of the OSCE.  •

¹ Parliament Austria. Parliamentary Correspondence No. 111 of 3 February 2023. “Foreign Minister Schallenberg defends entry permit for Russian OSCE delegation.”
² “OSZE: Österreich rechtlich verpflichtet, allen Delegationen für Tagung Visa auszustellen” (OSCE: Austria legally obliged to issue visas to all delegations for meeting). In: Der Standard of 7 February 2023
³ Swaton, Chiara. “Österreich verteidigt Teilnahme Russlands an OSZE-Plenartagung” (Austria defends Russia’s participation in OSCE Plenary Session). In: Euractiv.de of 7 February 2023
⁴ Scheidegger, Christina. «Diplomatische Turbulenzen vor OSZE-Tagung in Wien». (Diplomatic turbulence before OSCE meeting in Vienna) In: Radio SRF, Echo der Zeit of 10 February 2023
⁵ Wüthrich, Marianne. “The OSCE is only as strong as the global political climate permits”. In: Current Concerns of 8 August 2020
⁶ “Lawrow will OSZE-Friedensinitiative: Die Nato steht an unseren Grenzen und erklärt uns zum Feind”. (Lavrov wants OSCE peace initiative: NATO stands on our borders and declares us the enemy). In: RT deutsch of 6 December 2019