Reinforcing co-operation between OSCE, Council of Europe key to being effective and preventing overlap, says Slovak Foreign Minister

VIENNA, 28 February 2008 - Promoting co-operation and avoiding duplication are challenges that the OSCE and the Council of Europe face, said the Chairman of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, Slovak Foreign Minister Jan Kubis, at the OSCE Permanent Council today.

Minister Kubis, who served as OSCE Secretary General from 1999 to 2005, said that strengthening co-operation with other international organizations and the OSCE in particular was one of the priorities of Slovakia as Council of Europe chair.

"We firmly believe that promoting such co-operation is essential to achieve our common objective to protect human rights and promote democracy and the rule of law," he said. "To reinforce each other it is necessary to pool our respective expertise and strengths: the Council of Europe with its unique role in the standard-setting field and the monitoring of the application of these standards, and the OSCE with its long-standing experience in the field."

He highlighted the areas where the two organizations work well together, including promoting tolerance, fighting trafficking, electoral assistance and national minorities. The Minister also praised the positive effect achieved through co-operation on the ground, for example between field operations in Belgrade, Pristina and Yerevan.

"These all are the proofs of both organizations' complementarities we appreciate. On the other hand we are sometimes lacking to acknowledge a substantive overlap in their activities," he said.

Minister Kubis emphasized the need to reinforce high-level political co-operation between the OSCE and the Council of Europe, and said that preventing duplication was a challenge: "The Council of Europe and the OSCE may share the lead in different areas of responsibilities where the activities of one Organization would come to complement the work of the other."

The Permanent Council is the Organization's main regular decision-making body.