THE OSCE CHALLENGED - NHC/IHF

PART V: NEW CHALLENGES AND NEW THREATS FOR THE OSCE
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ms. ludmilla alexeyeva (ihf):
“The OSCE states lack political will”

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Who plans for the future, should know the past. As Ms. Ludmilla Alexeyeva, President of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) has been involved in the Helsinki movement from the very beginning, she is pre-eminently placed to describe the reasons for its existence. In the Soviet Union in 1976, setting up an NGO on the basis of the humanitarian provisions of the Helsinki Accords was necessary because domestic Soviet law didn’t give Soviet citizens any tools to demand respect for their basic human rights.
And it worked, argues Ms. Alexeyeva: the consolidated effort of OSCE-participating states contributed to the freeing of political prisoners, to freedom of foreign travel and to freedom of expression in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states.
Even nowadays, the OSCE mechanism is still highly relevant according to Ms. Alexeyeva, as OSCE missions in for instance Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan remain the most effective source of knowledge on the local human rights scene. However, human rights violations in these countries have not yet been stopped because of a lack of political will of the OSCE-participating states.
As regards Chechnya, Ms. Alexeyeva calls on the human rights community to do whatever it takes for an OSCE mission to be restored on Chechen soil, making clever use of the official Russian point of view that a peaceful settlement process is under way in Chechnya.
To conclude, Ms. Alexeyeva suggests that all OSCE-participating states should include a human rights course in their school curricula.
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“I would like to make some suggestions for our common future activity—but I will begin with some historical facts.
Twenty-seven years ago, in May 1976, I had the honour of being involved in creating the Moscow Helsinki Group that I chair today. The name of the organization has the ‘Moscow’ attribute, because the Group was established, and has been functioning, in Moscow, and it holds the ‘Helsinki’ epithet because the work of our organization was built around humanitarian provisions of the Helsinki Accords, officially know as the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, signed in Helsinki.
The Moscow Helsinki Group became the seed that started up the Helsinki movement currently embodied in the International Helsinki Federation on Human Rights (IHF). So I have witnessed, and participated in, the Helsinki process from its very beginning until the present day. And of course, I was analysing the development of this process all the time.
The first question that cropped up in the days of shaping the Moscow Helsinki Group was: why had Doctor Yuri Orlov, its founder and first chairman, the idea of setting up an NGO on the basis of the humanitarian provisions of the Helsinki Accords? The answer to this question is: because the Constitution of the Soviet Union didn’t give us, Soviet citizens and human rights activists, any tools to demand respect for the basic human rights from the Soviet leaders. The Soviet Constitution contained no safeguards to assure implementation of those basic rights. What is more, in those days, either observation or non-observation of constitutional rights by any country would be perceived as a domestic matter under the generally agreed rules of the game, and they could not be used as grounds for the democratic community of nations to any demands of the Soviet leadership. In the meantime, the USSR-based human rights movement needed some legal basis for placing relevant demands and getting them appropriately backed up by world democracies. This largely explains why it was precisely in the former Soviet Union that an original effort was made to launch an NGO that would proceed from humanitarian provisions, held by the Helsinki Accords—a document signed by all Western democracies and Soviet Bloc countries.

Doctor Orlov’s idea to establish the Moscow Helsinki Group turned out to be very fruitful. Not in the initial stage of its activity, but, by 1980, the demands for the Soviet leaders to observe its Helsinki commitments fully, including humanitarian right, had been supported by all democracies that came as Soviet partners under the Helsinki Accords. It was among others thanks to their consolidated effort that political prisoners, whose numbers in those Soviet times nearly reached three thousand, were eventually released from prisons. Also, measures, of the OSCE had resulted in the Soviet authorities making some revolutionary shifts in the relationships between the State and its citizens. People, for one thing, were allowed to leave and return to the country freely. And, I am sure, the Soviet Union’s OSCE membership played a tremendous role in drafting and passing legislation on the freedom of expression and mass media. The Helsinki process also played its role in the former Soviet satellite countries.

All facts from our recent past clearly indicate that the OSCE mechanism is well suited to assure observation of human rights in countries where the relevant standards are not adequate to the humanitarian requirements, as described by the Helsinki Accords. Signatories to the Helsinki Accords include Central Asian states. OSCE missions in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan play a very important role as they continue to be the most effective source of knowledge on the local human rights scene and to operate as the sole independent partners of local human rights NGOs.
You might argue that those missions are not able to counter human rights violations in those countries. I would agree. But it was a question of a political will of the partners under the Helsinki process. The former Soviet Union was a much more difficult partner than the current Turkmenbashi (?), for example. Only through lack of coordinated actions of his Helsinki partners, Turkmenbashi is allowed to carry on in his despotic incarnation. Citizens from Helsinki process countries, human-rights NGOs from the International Helsinki Federation in the first place, should stimulate their governments to increase pressure on such Helsinki process countries to respect their humanitarian obligations, as formulated by the Helsinki Accords.

Now, I just can’t but say a word on Chechnya, because it continues to be the hottest and most painful spot in the whole of Europe. Given its well-covered and massive human-rights violations, today’s Russia can hardly be likened to the former Soviet Union that provided a classic example of a totalitarian state. To emphasize, the Chechen Republic is the only one of the 89 Russian regions where laws are not working and where even the right to live—a basic human right—fails to be safeguarded. Give this context, Chechnya badly needs the OSCE mission restored there. This is particularly important as Chechnya has been cut off from the outside world. It is a territory with no international observers. Even Russian reporters face great difficulties when trying to get there. The only independent sources of knowledge about Chechnya are a few Russian NGOs operating there in cooperation with a few local human rights activists. The old Chechen-based OSCE mission played a very important role in the days of the first Chechen war, functioning both as an independent knowledge provider and as a mediator during negotiations between warring parties. The Russian federal government’s official policy on Chechnya is this: the war has been completed, and a peaceful settlement process is under way. Given this policy, nothing is supposed to be in the way of an OSCE mission being dispatched to this Russian region. Common efforts of Russia’s partners under the Helsinki Accords are necessary, and expected, to help achieve the result desired by both Russia and the international community: to restore peaceful conditions in the Chechen Republic. The International Helsinki Federation and the entire human rights community should do whatever it takes for an OSCE mission to be restored on Chechen soil.

And one more suggestion: today, the mechanism of OSCE might be applied to help spread public awareness of human rights and to teach skills in protecting human rights in all European countries and in all countries of former Soviet Union, a suggestion from the OSCE Russian mission based in Vienna which I strongly support. The point is to combine efforts of all signatory-countries in order to draft a basic guidebook on human rights and include it in a basic school program. Also, an agreement should be reached on the need for all OSCE countries to have a human rights course in their standard school curricula. This kind of development would be a real step forward to a common understanding of the ‘human rights’ phenomena by the younger generation in all these countries, and would greatly contribute towards improving the human rights situation, which in many OSCE countries is far from reflecting the standards set in the humanitarian articles contained in the Helsinki Accords.”

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