OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities13

The office of The High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) of the Organi­zation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was created by the OSCE in 1992 as a conflict prevention mechanism, in the wake of the escalating violence in the Balkans.

Although nothing in the HCNM’s mandate explicitly requires a normative framing for its work, its placement within the OSCE itself implicitly recognizes that human rights and minority rights principles are an inte­gral component of this mechanism.¹⁴ It is important to stress, however, that the High Commissioner was not conceived of as an advocate for minority groups; hence the title High Commissioner on rather than for National Minorities. This was done to preserve the idea of the HCNM as a security and conflict prevention mechanism, and also to assure the OSCE member states that the role was not to be an adversary of governments, but instead to advise both minority groups and governments on how to avoid escalatory confrontation. Thus, from the beginning, the HCNM was to integrate a rights-based and a conflict resolution-based approach. Its role has been described as that of a “normative mediator” (Ratner, 2000: 591) in that the High Commissioner has relied upon human rights conventions as a framework for the recommendations he makes to both governments and minority groups.

The HCNM’s work in Romania shows how this integrated process operates. In the wake of Romanian independence from the Soviet Union and rising repression of its Hungarian minority, key issues for the Hungarians in Romania were language and education rights, and Hungarian participation in national politics (Horvath, 2002).

Max Van der Stoel, a former Foreign Minister of the Netherlands who held the position of High Commissioner from its inception in 1992 until 2002, began visiting Romania in 1993 and continued working there throughout his 10-year term. He also visited Hungary, the “kin state” of the minority, helping to diffuse tensions cre­ated by Hungarian government support for the Hungarians in Romania. He began by encouraging the Romanian government to adopt legislation on minorities and education, and helped to expand the duties of the Advocate of the People, an ombuds position established by the 1991 Constitution. He later made specific legal recommendations for a Law on National Minorities, drawing from several OSCE, Council of Europe, and UN documents. When the Romanian government enacted a controversial Law on Education in 1995, he diffused the tension it created in a public statement simultaneously reassuring the Hungarian minority of the new possibilities that this opened for cre­ative policy development and reminding the Government of its obligations “...pursuant to international standards” (Kemp, 2001: 238). Along with the non-governmental Founda­tion on Inter-Ethnic Relations, he provided seminars, training programs, and roundtable discussions on implementing minority rights, education opportunities for minorities, and OSCE procedures and legal frameworks on inter-ethnic relations (Horvath, 2002).

Finally, van der Stoel worked to improve relations between Romania and Hungary, diffusing their disagreement on the inter­pretation of group rights for minorities and paving the way for the 1996 signing of the Hungarian-Romanian Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation (Horvath, 2002). By 1997, Romania had also created a Department for the Protection of Ethnic Minorities, and representatives of the Hungarian minority first held ministerial posts in the govern­ment elected in November 1996 (Kemp, 2001:239).

An in-depth analysis of this case, under­taken by The Centre for OSCE Research at the University of Hamburg, found that the High Commissioner played a critical role in diffusing crisis situations in 1995 (after the new education law) and in 1998 when the Hungarian political party threatened to leave the government. In both circumstances, he changed the frame of the debate and helped both sides see new possibilities.