Thaindian News

By Meena Kar
Dec 1, (THAINDIAN NEWS) Kazakhstan hosted the first summit of OSCE on Wednesday despite the several questions raised regarding the blemishes of the venue. This is the first meeting since 1999, when the last meeting at Istanbul was held. Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is a trans-Atlantic security group that aims to prevent further conflict in Europe and former Soviet Union and takes up other security issues.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev who hosted the meeting, opened it by saying that this meeting is a sign of rebirth for the organization. He further recommended for single security space that would cover “the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic and Indian Oceans,” as in most cases, the European security is vulnerable to foreign threats. This meeting is also expected to take up the issues of international drug trafficking and terrorism apart from problems in Afghanistan. This meeting was attended by 56 European countries with their heads of state and high level diplomats, including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. However, the Human rights campaigners have constantly criticized the host nation for its poor record of democracy, which according to them, makes the venue most unsuitable for hosting such an event. The nation also has a very poor record of human rights. Although government assured a better human right provision in 2007, it eventually failed to live up to the people’s expectations.

The critics have stated that the idea to host the OSCE was just a desperate attempt to elate its image overseas and establish its might as an oil rich nations. After hosting the biggest event ever, on the nation’s soil, the critics expects that Kazakhstan would automatically get an extra edge to combat any sensible international criticism and move ahead with its notoriously poor democracy and lack of human rights.