NEWS

100 days to Astana Summit, OSCE Chairperson-in-Office

ASTANA, 23 August 2010 - The OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Kazakhstan's Secretary of State and Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev, today said the forthcoming Summit on 1 and 2 December in Astana represented a unique opportunity to respond to common security threats facing the 56 participating States.

"The Astana Summit, organized at the initiative of Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev and the first such meeting of heads of State to take place in more than a decade, represents an historic chance for our nations and political leaders to demonstrate to the world that the OSCE's founding principles of co-operative and comprehensive security are as relevant and essential as ever for tackling the challenges of the 21st century," said Saudabayev.

"We have much work to do in the remaining 100 days before the Summit, so that this historic meeting in Astana takes place at a high substantive and organizational level where the OSCE leaders could strengthen and reinvigorate our common Organization and set the stage for the shift from the concept of a 'space of security' from Vancouver to Vladivostok to one of a 'community of security'."

The decision to hold a Summit this year was adopted by the Organization's foreign ministers on 3 August following agreement at the Informal Ministerial in Almaty in mid-July. The Astana Summit will be the seventh in the Organization's history. Previous summits were held 1975 in Helsinki, 1990 in Paris, 1992 in Helsinki, 1994 in Budapest, 1996 in Lisbon and 1999 in Istanbul.

The review conference for the Astana Summit will be held in three parts in Warsaw, Vienna, and Astana starting on 30 September.

Date of issue: 2010-08-23