 It is a pleasure and an honor for me to be with you today. I do realize that we didn't know this before and unfortunately we're coinciding with the inauguration of your president and let me use this opportunity to congratulate you over that. It's my first trip to Ireland and it takes place with a very good agenda, an agenda of the chairmanship of the organization for next year. It's going to be an interesting year and I see that Ireland is preparing itself very seriously to be ready to take on efficiently this challenge. Here it's been for me very short but very intense visit. I was yesterday at the Oroctis where I met with the Foreign Affairs Committee, the chairman, but I also met with the parliamentary group of the OSCE, of the parliamentary group dealing with the OSCE parliamentary assembly. We had an external meeting with the Tonnister last evening, where we discussed the issues on the agenda of the organization. First of all, the program and the expectations for the ministerial invillions. The ministerial invillions will in many ways also have an impact on the priorities and on the work of the chairmanship next year. And there will be a few things in the invillions that will need to be decided and sorted out because otherwise they will affect also and have an impact on the chairmanship next year. And the first of these is agreeing on a chairmanship for the organization for 2014, which is still an open issue. Work on the conflict, it is good we've heard about the appointments of two special representatives the last few days. I think it's very good also from the Irish side steps have been taken to have a good team in place well in time before the beginning of the chairmanship. And in looking at issues to, how can I say, to adjust the agenda at best to address some of the new challenges and threats, which will be the main part of my talk to you today. But now looking at the OSCE broadly, where do we stand in terms of development of the organization and of the agenda of the organization? We are now in the year that has followed the summit, the Astana summit, summit that was significant in many ways. It was a summit that took place at the end of a chairmanship by, for the first time, by a country that is a country, is a former Soviet country. It's a summit that took place in Central Asia, highlighting one of the important features of the geographic dimension of the OSCE, what we call the Eurasian dimensions, which together with the transatlantic one is one of the two geostatic legs, if you want, of the organization. And it introduced some new concepts, a concept, the vision of the OSCE as a security community, which is an interesting concept that we will have to develop, explore and develop together in the next months and years. The OSCE has come a long way over time. This summit has taken place after a gap of 11 years from the last one in 1999. And this has been a time for the OSCE, a time of evolution, of change. And there is now, this is a time really to draw some of the conclusions from this and perhaps to regroup and move forward. So this is a bit also the challenge for the Irish chairmanship as it's about to begin. If we look back, the OSCE was born as the CSCE, as a conference putting together a group of countries. The agenda of the OSCE, which is a broad approach to security, was an agenda that was not the result of a, how can I say, of a common vision. It was an agenda that was the result of a tough negotiation between these groups. And it was an agenda that encompassed a very broad approach to security that includes the traditional political military issues and disarmament and confidence buildings, but also the human rights dimension and the need to build democratic institutions and guarantee the fundamental freedoms, but also includes an economic element, security through strengthening economic ties and develop economic cooperation. If this was the agenda of the, let's say, of the Cold War period of the OSCE, the Paris Charter at the end of the Cold War set the pace for a different phase. A phase that was a phase of transition after the Cold War. A phase that was marked by conflicts in the former Yugoslavia where the OSCE started developing new tools for engaging through its missions on the ground, practicing in a way what it had been preaching, assisting countries in dealing with their conflicts, first of all, and secondly rebuilding, building democratic institutions and performing up to the standards that were agreed in the organization in terms of democratic transition. And that's when the OSCE became more institutionalized. In fact, the CSC became the OSCE in that phase. The OSCE created the institutions like the ODIR in Warsaw, the Office for Human Rights and Democratic Institutions, the High Commissioner for National Minorities in Warsaw, the Office for the Freedom of the Media in Vienna, it created the Conflict Prevention Center and the Secretariat started growing around this. So the OSCE became much more operational at that point. It started developing concepts for intervening in crisis, tools for early warning, tools for prevention of conflicts and for post-conflict rehabilitation. It started linking up more with other institutions, European organizations, NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe and the UN. And the UN has always been a reference organization for the OSCE, which is a regional organization under the sense of chapter 8 of the UN Charter. Then came September 11. And September 11 started a new phase. At some point there was a realization that the OSCE, that had been always being conceived as a tool to address the security issues within the community of states that it represents. At some point it had also to start looking outside its borders because some of the new challenges had a different nature. They were global in nature. And therefore new tools needed to be developed to deal with this new kind of challenges. And there we have both thematic approaches that start being developed but also new cooperation processes, the partnerships. The OSCE started having gathering friends in a way, countries that were looking at the OSCE experience as a potential model, certainly as an interesting regional, to want to call it experiment. Certainly an example of a community that had chosen to address its own issues, to bridge its own differences, to develop tools, to build trust within the community, in a way different from others. And the number of countries were really interested at what we are doing to the point that they decided to link up with this community through these partnerships. And now we have a number of partners in the Mediterranean region, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, or in East Asia. And we have groups of partners with which we discuss some of these challenges that are in many ways also common. But of course the interaction changes according to the geographic location and to the nature of these partnerships. Now these challenges, these new threats, we call them TNT in OSCE jargon, transnational threats. For us they have been characterized by three main features because we approach them from a comprehensive perspective, this comprehensive approach of security that is so typical of the OSCE. So as we deal with terrorism, with trafficking, with organized crime, with trafficking in human beings, we look not only at the security side, the phenomenon in itself, but also there we take a broad approach. We look at the human rights side of it. We look at the economic impact of some of these. And we develop tools that span across these dimensions to address them. And the OSCE gives us another strength in a way in allowing us to be as effective as we can in addressing these things. The OSCE promotes security not only as a tool to improve the stability of individual countries. Certainly the OSCE is an intergovernmental organization so the processes are primarily intergovernmental. It takes place among countries who make the decisions at the end of the day as they participate in states of the organization. But the OSCE also operates at two different levels. One is the individual level. As we talk about human rights and fundamental freedoms, we do connect with individuals. We work to promote the human dignity without the countries. And that also strengthens the security in a way, in the areas where we operate. Because of the attention, the ability of the organization to connect with individuals, to connect with NGOs, to work with NGOs. At the other level, we look also at the interest of the community as such. So we look at the regional level. And we look at situations where the interest of the community overrides the interest of individual states. And sometimes we really push countries to make an effort to understand that a little sacrifice for a single country may represent an advantage for the larger community. And personally, I've come across situations of this kind myself a number of times in my past experiences with the OSCE. For instance, in discussing in the context of arms control negotiations, a number of times countries who had a very strong political agenda at the end of the day had to make a compromise for the sake of reaching an agreement that would satisfy everybody's requirement. And that's the kind of elements that put together, build a security community. And that's what we're striving really to maintain and to develop all the time. And the second element is really looking at the inclusiveness of how we work in these areas. So promoting interaction as we work on these new challenges with the participating states, with the other international actors, looking at who is doing what, trying to identify the areas where we can best offer a contribution based on what the organization is and what the organization can offer and avoiding simply setting an agenda and marching for this regardless of what everybody else is doing. I think by their nature these challenges are so vast that no individual country, no individual organization alone can make a difference. This is where you need an integrated approach of the international community where various actors can operate and then come in as much as possible in a way that is synergistic, in a way that is strategic and coordinated. Contributing from its angle. We have examples of this. I was mentioning the partners of cooperation. There is a discussion on Afghanistan going on. I was last week in Istanbul. There was a conference on Afghanistan looking at the horizon of 2014 and the process of a military disengagement and moving on from there. And as we look at Afghanistan now, we look at a situation where there has to be an increasing responsibilities of the countries of the region in ensuring stability for the region itself, which is a very composite region. It's a region we can't even define in terms of other than the group of countries that border on Afghanistan, but it's a very diverse group. So certainly we are not looking at building something. There were some actually. We're thinking in terms of building some kind of an OSC process there, but the region is so diverse that I think this will be a very difficult effort to move forward. But certainly there are interesting common between the countries, the border of Afghanistan. And this is enough, I think, to start a political process, the process of dialogue and of cooperation among these countries to identify the areas where they can make a difference, they can make a contribution, and to identify the added value, the added contribution that each of them can bring to the table. And the OSC is one of those who sit at that table. We have Central Asian states that are part of that group of neighboring countries. We are already involved in a number of very relevant activities. We are training, for instance, border guards in Central Asia. We have an academy in Tajikistan in Dushanbe. Where we are training Afghan border guards, we have trained hundreds of Afghan border guards together with the Central Asian border guards. We have bilateral programs. I was in Turkmenistan a week ago, and we discussed the continuation of a program that we started already. It's a bilateral Turkmen Afghan program, again focusing on border guards and customs officers. The interesting element in this is that beyond the capacity building element and the training element, there's also the cooperation element, bringing the people together, training them together, having them get to know each other better. And I think that's also an important factor in all this. Similarly, I could talk about our Mediterranean partners. There is also there a process of change, of course, of very profound transformation of the societies, the so-called Arab Spring. And there is a debate in the OSC. These countries are partners. We in the OSC, we went ourselves through a process of deep transformation of our own societies. We as the OSC, we've been involved in assisting that in building the democratic institution, in training the police, reforming the police to help the police understand how to operate these circumstances when people go out on the squares and you can't really go back to old policing methods, just robust control. You need a bit more of a community, especially in areas where there are ethnic imbalances and minorities, and you need to have also sensitivity of the police in operating in those difficult environments. And we have experienced that in a number of places. In Kyrgyzstan we have a large program. We've been training police as the OSC in Kosovo. The OSC police school in Kosovo was very successful and I saw it from my UN job. The quality of the Kosovo policemen was in fact excellent. Actually, to the point that when they had the constitutional crisis they took the deputy head of police and they appointed as the president of Kosovo. Which was quite an acknowledgement of the good job done by the OSC, beyond of course the acknowledgement of the very high professionality and the leadership of the person in question. So there is this debate and when I traveled in September, I traveled to Cairo. I met with the secretary general, new secretary general of the Arab League. It was appointed the same day when I was appointed former Egyptian foreign minister. Extremely open minded I found him and extremely interested in looking at our own experience. We invited him to come to Vienna to visit us and to speak to the permanent council and we are looking to the logistics of it now but he's very interested in coming and he wants to understand better how the OSC works. I think he has some ideas himself for the Arab League. He would like to operationalize it a bit more but he's very much interested also in linking up to us. He proposed immediately an MOU and it was so interesting, the push that I had to slow down and say wait a minute I need to go back and check with our own participating states if we are ready to move as fast as you would like us to do. So I was in a way even surprised by the seagerness of linking up and seeing and look at the lessons we learned. Certainly as we look at the Mediterranean if at all and we will have to see how this develops what we are talking about is a gentle way of sharing our own experiences without really interfering in processes that are very different from the ones we've gone through in terms of societal structures, culture, religion, whatever. But then in a way we have had our own transitions also in countries that are Muslim countries, Central Asia, et cetera. So we do have some of our experiences are in a way rather relevant and some of the tools that we have developed to address our own problems may be relevant also for them. So there are things we could do for them and capacity building and we started in some fields for instance with the Egyptians. I met at the meetings also with the Egyptian government there. We've been training Egyptian NGOs in election monitoring and they went to Warsaw at their office there and they were very keen to go again and et cetera. We've had staff from the Egyptian Foreign Ministry serving as interns in our secretariat. They were also curious to understand better how we work, how we operate. So there is, when there were elections in Tunisia the Tunisians asked the OSCE to help observe and the Parliamentary Assembly sent a group there. The report was a positive one. So it was also there a good interrelationship whether at some point we managed to put together the dots and out of these things to develop a policy that's a different matter because this will depend very much first of all on whether the countries themselves will want a stronger engagement from aside and secondly whether there is which is also something that cannot be taken for granted a consensus within the organisation in going down that road. The OSCE as I mentioned is a flexible organisation. It has adjusted quite a bit throughout and I mentioned the three phases. It has developed tools as they were needed and has abandoned all practices but while doing this it has never lost track of its core values the values of principles of Helsinki which remain I think at the core of what the OSCE is today. But certainly as we move forward in addressing these new challenges first of all we need to operate on the basis of what participating states tell us about their own concerns and what they perceive as being the major challenges for themselves. So it's a matter of also following this is very much work in progress what we are discussing today in view of the ministerial in December in Vilnius where there are issues such as cyber terrorists now on the agenda so there is a discussion this is a relevant issue it's an issue that is perceived by many as one of the new threats for which we need to equip ourselves so we are really in the process of discussing how relevant is the OSCE as a tool for addressing this what is the contribution that we can give along with others and there is work on a decision that might mandate us to do more. I would expect this decision to be adopted in Vilnius based on everything I've seen and so certainly we have to equip ourselves also to respond to this new challenge but we need also to retain coherence in the way we operate when I arrived a few months ago and I looked at the secretariat I saw that we had created specialized units to deal with borders to deal with trafficking in human beings to deal with police and police reforms to deal with terrorism and we had them in different places so I've now regrouped them all and created a unit with the director there is a discussion in the budget so it's a matter of also accompanying this flexibility of the OSCE with some elements of reform and restructuring that allow us also to maximize the synergies and to increase the efficiency in the organization so a few words looking forward first of all on the structures this is the beginning of restructuring and we will continue over time and I would expect to work very closely with the Irish chairmanship towards next year's budget to see what further steps can be made to improve in further the efficiency of the system the OSCE through not only to the secretariat but also to the institutions I mentioned and through the operations that we have on the ground the operations still remain one of the strengths of the OSCE most of our staff in fact is deployed on the ground we have very light structures at the quarter level we will have to focus on the key priorities and see how we can move ahead certainly the board of management college I mentioned in Duchamp Bay is something we want to sustain over time and I will continue myself also investing efforts in ensuring that there is support financial in terms of resources for us to continue we also have a customs school in Bishkek which is equally important we will have to continue making efforts working together with other international organizations particularly the UN especially in the area of terrorism we have been working with the UN on the one hand with our own participating states on the other to make sure that all relevant UN conventions and resolutions on terrorism are incorporated in the national legislation of all our individual countries at the end of the day the efficiency of the organization encountering a phenomenon is difficult in terms of having the disposal of the organization the necessary tools to deal effectively with it the efficiency of the organization is measured on the weakest link in the chain in a way so that's where we need to intervene we need to see who are the countries that need more support and we have to focus on them and help them help the community in a way and that's one of the priorities for us and we certainly continue that we will continue building expert networks and act as a platform for the exchange of best practices this is another way in which we can contribute to this and for instance we have done this through the establishment in 2006 of a network of focal points on border security and management so every country has designated a focal point and this network allows us really to circulate these best practices and to develop activities or assistance based on what we see the weak points in the system and in some areas the OSCE has indeed become a recognized leader this is the example of trafficking in human beings where now our own expertise is widely recognized in working both with countries of origin of this problem and recipient countries and you need a very broad range of tools to deal with that because obviously the issue is different whether you deal with a society that does produce this phenomenon and you combat with organized crime there etc or whether it's the transit problem and the controls and the borders management issue and the recipient countries and the legislation working with prosecutors there so it is a very complex work and the other advantage of the OSCE is that what the OSCE does it does it in a cheap manner these times when we have a financial crisis and everybody is looking at budgets we ourselves are going through a painful budget discussion I found myself at some point talking to our own participating states telling them but let's not lose when there is a discussion about zero real growth versus zero nominal growth and budget cuts here and there and I would say I'm coming from Kosovo I was in Kosovo ahead of a mid-size UN peacekeeping operation a good operation but nothing extraordinary in a way and my budget when I started there was 220 million dollars the budget of the OSCE which is in euros but it's 150 million that budget covers the secretariat three institutions, 17 field operations 3,000 people on the ground it's not an expensive organization at all it costs less than a mid-size UN peacekeeping operation it's a good investment it's a good investment in security it's a good investment because it deals with conflict prevention deals with the human aspects of security it is an organization that for the little money you put in it is giving you quite a bit of return so I think also this has to be appreciated and I made one of my priorities start in my work also trying to raise the visibility of what we do working on conflict prevention is something that is difficult to set successful nothing happens and it's difficult to argue with when CNN is there ready to look at the armored combat vehicle that goes in and fights against the insurgents or whatever if you have prevented all that nobody is even saying thank you it's even difficult to argue that it was you who did it so in a way I think it is important also for us to find a way to market better our organization a penny invested in conflict prevention saves you lots of dollars or pounds or whatever in crisis management I think this should always be kept in mind okay I think I'll leave it at this this was a bit of a general outlook but I'm happy to have a discussion with the public thank you so much