News and press releases

VIENNA, 25 July 2022- OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) Acting Head of Mission Antje Grawe today denounced the persecution of SMM’s national Mission members, including those deprived of their liberty in non-government controlled areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, refuted claims against them, and called for their immediate and unconditional release.

Director of the OSCE Conflict Prevention Centre (CPC) and Deputy Head of the OSCE Secretariat Tuula Yrjölä concluded her two-day visit to Kyrgyzstan where she held bilateral meetings with host country officials, and discussed, inter alia, OSCE-Kyrgyzstan co-operation, especially in light of the 30year anniversary of Kyrgyzstan’s participation in the Organization, regional co-operation, and current security challenges.

19 July 2022- OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Foreign Minister of Poland, Zbigniew Rau, and OSCE Secretary General, Helga Maria Schmid, today reiterated their call for the unconditional and immediate release of three national Mission members of the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM), detained in Donetsk and Luhansk for more than three months.

Bucharest, 15 July 2022 — The OSCE Secretary General, Helga Maria Schmid, today concluded her visit to Bucharest, where she attended the second edition of the Moldova Support Platform conference and met with high-level officials.

The OSCE Moscow Mechanism mission of experts undertaken by Professor Veronika Bílková, Professor Laura Guercio and Professor Vasilka Sancin presented their findings to the OSCE Permanent Council on 14 July 2022, collected in the report entitled ‘Report on Violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Committed in Ukraine (1 April – 25 June 2022)’.

Twenty-five Special Unit officers of Tajikistan’s Border Troops started the course on Sustaining Field Operational Capacity on 12 July in the Regional Training Center of Tajikistan's Border Troops in Shahrinav district. The training course is conducted within the framework of the Patrol Field Capacity Building project through the promotion of Regional Cooperation, financed by the Republic of France and implemented by the OSCE Programme Office in Dushanbe.

An OSCE-organized regional training workshop on risk management based on the analysis of nonverbal communication, including emotional facial and body expressions, took place from 12 to 14 July 2022. The workshop brought together, online and in-person, around 80 officials from relevant border and