Photo East European Security Research Initiative
Main theses of Iryna Sushko’s intoducing speech on the opening of 13th Working session of annual OSCE meeting on issues of human dimension (HDIM-2016)
While we have to acknowledge the progress done by many (OSCE) participating states to ensure better conditions for free travel, facilitating of border crossing, current political background remains negative when political manipulation with migration agenda, migration phobia are generated and widely spread and transformed into remarkable success of far right political views throughout OSCE area.
We need not to allow evident negative trends to become predominant.
New regional conflicts, military escalation, annexation of territories of sovereign states became a powerful challenge preventing millions of people from the legitimate travel.
Migration crisis in the EU has generated a high level of uncertainty when it comes to the further facilitation of the travel and migration regimes of the OSCE area.
The remarkable success here was the process launched by EU with visa liberalization for the countries of the Eastern Partnership that created a favorable policy environment to promote sensible reforms. In the case of Ukraine it was anti-corruption legislation, reform of identification documents, border and migration management, and combating discrimination.
But further application of the visa liberalization model requires trustful relations between the countries. There is evident deficit of trust on the OSCE area now.
Legitimate travel rights of millions of people in Crimea and Donbas have been essentially damaged, when issuance of identification documents was abandoned, and consulates were closed in these regions.
Documents issued in Crimea after 2014 are not legitimate to travel to EU.
One leaders of indigenous Crimean population, Crimean Tatars were banned by Russian occupying authorities to enter Crimea, the other Crimean Tatars leaders, who are staying in Crimea, are not eligible to leave peninsula due to the politically motivated investigations. As the problem is massive and multiple one, we may identify the Crimean Tatars as the first ethnic group in Europe in 21st century de-facto deprived of the normal way of domestic and international travel.
My reccommendations to OSCE member states:
Мої рекомендації державам-членам ОБСЄ:
- to make more efforts to protect people’s right to free movement where it was limited
- to support countries that have fulfilled all the technical criteria set by the Visa Liberalisation Action Plan
