Lithuanian representatives will boycott the winter session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna after Austria allowed Russian representatives to attend.
The OSCE PA’s winter session in Vienna will take place on 23-24 February, exactly one year after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The Guardian reported that eighteen Russian lawmakers are expected to attend the meeting.
“The final decision is not to attend,” said Vilija Aleknaitė-Abramikienė, head of the Lithuanian parliamentary delegation, on Tuesday.
“We have made our minds and we are united, both the position and the opposition [in the Lithuanian parliament], and there are no different views here,” the head of the Lithuanian delegation said.
In a joint statement issued after their meeting in Vilnius earlier this month, Nordic, Baltic, and Polish parliamentary delegations said that Russia must be held accountable and responsible for its actions in Ukraine, and that an international legal mechanism should be created to assess the aggressor’s crimes.
They noted that Russia’s participation in the OSCE PA meeting in Vienna will be used for propaganda at home and abroad and “will send a very disappointing message to the international community”.
Lithuanian MPs invited the Nordic, Baltic, and Polish counterparts to join a boycott, if Russia was allowed to attend, but unsuccessfully.
Aleknaitė-Abramikienė then said representatives of other countries decided to “fight the Russians in the same hall”.
All members of the Russian delegation have been on the EU sanctions lists since the beginning of 2014.
Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg recently said Vienna should allow all delegates from all participating states to enter Austria, but also regretted the meeting’s planned date as “a very unfortunate one”.
“But at the same time, we must not disregard the fact that we need platforms. The OSCE has never been an organisation of like-minded people,” he told the Austrian Public Broadcast’s show Zeit im Bild in an interview earlier this week.
Russia has been causing problems in the OSCE over the last 18 months after it has failed to give its approval on key matters including budgets and mandates. This has plunged the organisation into an administrative deadlock causing uncertainty about future operations and chairmanships.
There is no mechanism within the OSCE to remove or prohibit members from participating, therefore any move to prevent Russia from attending would likely have to relate to postponements or refusals to issue visas.
(LRT with EURACTIV.com)
Source: euractiv.com
