Overview  Morten Kjaerum, Director of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, listens to ODIHR Director Ambassador Lenarčič as he speaks at a conference on freedom of expression organized by the Agency in Paris on 8 December 2008. providing comments on draft legislation, often in co-operation with the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission. In 2008 alone, ODIHR issued a total of over 20 legal reviews. Over the course of the year, the Office greatly extended its involvement with participating States in improving the process leading to the adoption of laws, in line with principles of effectiveness and transparency. ODIHR is actively engaged with a number of participating States that are carrying out law-making reforms. This emerging ODIHR priority was also the topic of a Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting in November 2008. ODIHR continues to assist participating States in strengthening the rule of law. The Ministerial Council decision on the issue, adopted in December in Helsinki, will provide an important additional impetus for our work in this field. The role of constitutional justice in protecting human rights and upholding the rule of law was examined at last year’s Human Dimension Seminar, held in Warsaw in May. Following recommendations made at human dimension meetings during the year, ODIHR is refocusing and consolidating its work on democratic governance and participation in public ODIHR Director Janez Lenarčič (centre) visits a village destroyed in the aftermath of the August 2008 conflict in Georgia, 18 October 2008. OSCE/Jens Eschenbaecher a comprehensive report on its findings and a set of recommendations to the Ministerial Council in Helsinki in early December. This assessment was just one example of how ODIHR continued to flexibly respond to requests for assistance. Indeed, the year 2008 again tested ODIHR’s capability to react rapidly and professionally to emerging challenges and opportunities across the entire spectrum of its activities. In the field of elections, ODIHR deployed 10 needs assessment missions, seven full election observation missions, three limited election observation missions, and two election assessment missions, involving a total of 2,850 observers from 49 participating States. ODIHR observed elections across the entire OSCE region, in long-standing democracies as well as in countries in transition. The seminar on elections, organized by the Finnish Chairmanship in July, confirmed the strong support ODIHR’s election observation work enjoys among participating States, and provided an opportunity to review challenges to the implementation of commitments, to exchange good practices in following up on ODIHR recommendations. In its election observation activities, ODIHR sought to work in partnership with the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and other parliamentary groups, acknowledging the important contribution parliamentarians can make to joint efforts to assess electoral processes against OSCE commitments and other international standards. It was in this spirit that I met the President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Copenhagen in July in what was my first visit after taking over as Director of ODIHR. As regards ODIHR’s democratization work, a key achievement was the consolidation of the legal reform portfolio, where ODIHR has established a major role as a resource for states by Annual Report 2008 5