Our mandate on national minority issues

The OSCE’s mandate on national minority issues goes back to the 1992 Summit in Helsinki, where the Heads of State or Government decided to respond to the ethnic conflict and tensions between majority and minority groups evident in the early 1990s in such places as South-Eastern Europe, by creating an instrument of conflict prevention, the High Commissioner on National Minorities. The decision taken in Helsinki, part of the Summit document The Challenges of Change, mandated the High Commissioner to provide “early warning and, as appropriate, early action at the earliest possible stage in regard to tensions involving national minority issues which have not yet developed beyond an early warning stage, but, in the judgement of the High Commissioner, have the potential to develop into a conflict within the CSCECSCE
Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe area”.