Finland considers organising OSCE summit next year

Meeting would mark 35th anniversary of Helsinki CSCE Summit

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Finland is examining the possibility to arrange an extensive summit meeting in Helsinki next year to focus on security issues. The possibility of holding such a meeting has been discussed behind closed doors within the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe.
      The project is part of attempts to analyse Russia’s proposals for new talks on European security.
      “We are taking a cautiously open view of organising a meeting. Nothing concrete is on the table”, says Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Stubb (Nat. Coalition Party) to Helsingin Sanomat.
     
Diplomats who wished to remain anonymous told Helsingin Sanomat that the possibility of a new Helsinki OSCE meeting has been discussed among ambassadors fairly extensively, and the idea has not been shot down, either in the east or west. However, there are plenty of potential stumbling blocks.
      If the plans are implemented, the new meeting would take place 35 years after the leaders of 35 countries gathered in Helsinki to sign the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The human rights commitments of the CSCE document are seen to have helped pave the way for the collapse of the Soviet sphere of power at the end of the 1980s.
     
A new summit would be more extensive and more complicated than its predecessors. There are now 56 countries participating in the OSCE. Initial negotiations have not yet established what Russia’s security initiatives actually mean.
      Stubb says that the proposal for a return to Helsinki was made by Kazakhstan, and not Finland. Kazakhstan will serve as the holder of the chairmanship of the OSCE next year. Stubb said that he discussed the proposal with the Finnish President and Prime Minister. Finland decided that it would show the proposal “not a green light or a red one, but rather a yellow light”.
     
Showing too much enthusiasm for hosting such a meeting would be problematic before Russia’s proposals are better understood, and before the EU agrees on common goals for them. The view of the United States on the matter remains unclear.
      Establishing a common stand by the EU has been harmed by internal disagreements, as well as what is seen by diplomats as a passive attitude taken by the Czech Republic, the current holder of the EU Presidency.
     
Foreign Minister Stubb says that he has sent a letter to his EU colleagues on the proposed meeting. The starting point in the preparations is that all proposals will be heard, but that present structures must not be weakened. The EU countries are united in the view that the foundation of negotiations with Russia is extensive security, which also includes human rights questions and democracy.
      The Russian initiatives put forward by President Dmitri Medvedev express criticism of the current structures, mainly referring to NATO and the EU, as well as the OSCE. Russia has emphasised that it wants an agreement specifically on military security.
      The possibility of holding an OSCE summit in Helsinki next year could become clearer at an extraordinary foreign ministers’ meeting on the Greek island of Corfu at the end of June, Stubb says.
      The idea of linking the OSCE summit and security negotiations with the OSCE 35th anniversary in Helsinki might lower the threshold for sufficient progress at the Corfu meeting, diplomats say.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  OSCE Chairmanship keeps Finland busy to very end (4.11.2008)
  OSCE military observers granted extra time in Georgia (13.2.2009)
  Stubb regrets failure to reach declaration at OSCE meeting (8.12.2008)

Helsingin Sanomat