Fifty five member organisations of the Civic Solidarity Platform met in Warsaw over the weekend on 21-22 September to discuss the Platforms’ plans for the coming year and to talk about longer-term priorities. The Platform aims to step up support for its member organisations in campaigning on human rights issues as they arise. Joint silent protests were held at the plenary of the OSCE’s Human Dimension Implementation Meeting on the repression of peaceful protests against the way local elections in Russia were conducted. The Platform plans to follow up at the time of the OSCE’s Ministerial Council meeting in Bratislava in early December with a more general set of demands on countering threats to freedom of peaceful assembly.
Corruption as an expression but also a root cause and engine of human rights violations will be taken up more prominently by the Platform next year. A number of meeting participants also took the initiative to create a working group on climate justice which will seek to explore and highlight how the climate crisis affects the human rights of marginalized groups and of future generations, and how the Platform can contribute to support for environmental defenders.
In addition to the Platform’s traditional engagement with the OSCE, developments at the Council of Europe merit attention, the General Assembly concluded. The Council should resist and neutralize any attempts by governments or leading politicians to undermine its key values and standards.
