Basından
OSCE-Istanbul kicks off with Reassessment Conference
Istanbul - Turkish Daily News
HDN | 11/9/1999 12:00:00 AM |
Istanbul - Turkish Daily News In advance of the upcoming Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Summit, a three-day conference on human rights, security and the economy started in Istanbul yesterday. Norwegian Ambassador and OSCE term president Kai Eide made the opening speech at the meeting. The compatibility of OSCE member states with the organization's protocol is the agenda for this conference which will take place at Istanbul's Ciragan Palace. The OSCE Reassessment Conference,
Istanbul - Turkish Daily News
In advance of the upcoming Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Summit, a three-day conference on human rights, security and the economy started in Istanbul yesterday.
Norwegian Ambassador and OSCE term president Kai Eide made the opening speech at the meeting. The compatibility of OSCE member states with the organization's protocol is the agenda for this conference which will take place at Istanbul's Ciragan Palace.
The OSCE Reassessment Conference, as it is being called, is the extension of a meeting held in Vienna in October and will include 54 representatives from OSCE member states and 170 civic associations, approximately half of which are from Turkey.
Turkey's OSCE Ambassador Yalim Eralp stated that Turkey had recently made significant strides forward in the area of human rights and added that the violation of human rights was no longer considered the internal affair of states. Eralp said that human rights were no longer limited to freedom of thought and religious belief and that they now included group rights such as women's rights.
Noting that the violence caused by racism and xenophobia was a source of concern in Turkey Eralp suggested that such actions were damaging to the international community as a whole.
Eralp said that the best way to educate a society in human rights was to provide a strong civic society. He announced that steps had been taken in Turkey "to create a new kind of relation and understanding" between the state and civic society.
Halil Sivgin, president of the executive committee of the Foundation for the Development of Democracy in the Turkic World, said: "We ask people who criticize us on human rights to show some understanding. No other country has such a difficult strategic location as does Turkey."
Hasan Kaya, president of the Istanbul-based Kurdish Institute, said: "We will ask that Turkey be accepted in the European Union. We consider it unjust that new conditions for membership are constantly being imposed."
Zennur Cetinbas, representative of the Caucasus Foundation, said they would discuss the problems in the Northern Caucasus, including Russia's repressive policies and its economic embargo, and ask that steps be taken to find solutions to the problems.
