Slovakia Assumes OSCE Presidency on New Year's Day
Bratislava, January 1 (TASR) – Slovakia on New Year’s Day assumed its one-year presidency of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), with Slovak Foreign and European Affairs Minister Miroslav Lajcak (a Smer-SD nominee) due to present Slovakia’s priorities officially at the OSCE headquarters in Vienna on January 10.
“Slovakia as the presiding country will represent the OSCE externally during the upcoming period,” stated the Slovak Foreign Affairs Ministry’s press department, noting that Lajcak will serve in 2019 as Chairperson-in-Office of the organisation of 57 member and 11 partner states.
Slovakia is due to organise and co-organise around 50 OSCE events this year, including an informal meeting of foreign ministers in the summer.
“The presidency’s top event – the largest in Slovakia’s modern history – will be a meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council in December 2019, with around 70 national delegations expected to take part,” stated the ministry’s press department.
A dozen top-level international conferences will also be held in Slovakia to discuss, inter alia, anti-Semitism, violent extremism, the economy and the environment, cyber-security, and governance and reform of the security sector.
The three priorities of the Slovak presidency should be to prevent and mitigate the consequences of conflicts, and to secure future and effective multilateralism, with the presidency’s headline slogan being: ‘A Presidency Focused on People’.
