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At the press conference that marked the close of the second day of the informal meeting of the Foreign Affairs Ministers of the European Union in Luxembourg, on 16 April 2005, Jean Asselborn, Minister for Foreign Affairs and current President of the European Union Council, made the following statement on the subject of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE):
"With our partners from the candidate countries and future EU members - Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and Croatia - we had a detailed discussion of the OSCE. Dimitrij Rupel, Slovenia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, is the current president of this very important organisation. As the Member States of the European Union, the aforementioned countries are obviously members of this organisation as well. We place very great importance on what the OSCE does. Thirty years ago, the Final Act of Helsinki was signed and this process contributed to changing the face of the continent.
Recently, the organisation has been called into question and its fundamental pillars have been challenged, namely the human dimension. I wish to recall the European Union’s attachment to the OSCE’s activities in this area, and in particular election observation, field missions and border surveillance.
We discussed how to support OSCE and how to solve the current crisis.
We hope it will be possible to progress through a dialogue with the other members of the organisation and an in-depth dialogue, in particular with Russia."
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