Foreword to the First Edition F rom the outset, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), later transformed into the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has been very much a “work in progress”, an on-going process that has led to a significant expansion of its normative foundations. This expansion accelerated rapidly following the end of the Cold War, in a spirit of openness and change that very much characterizes the Charter of Paris for a New Europe and other documents adopted in the early 1990s. Since the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, the CSCE/OSCE has accumulated a substantial body of commitments in the fields of human rights, democracy, rule of law and national minorities. These commitments relating to the so-called human dimension of the OSCE are contained in an ever-growing set of documents adopted by CSCE/ OSCE Summits and other political forums. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to survey the achievements that have been made in developing new standards for the CSCE/OSCE area. As early as 1992, the Helsinki Summit recommended “the drawing up of compilations of existing CSCE Human Dimension commitments in order to promote greater understanding of the implementation of these commitments”. Subsequently, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR) produced in 1995 a chronological compilation of human dimension commitments. This compilation represented a first and important step towards facilitating access to the OSCE’s body of commitments. However, five years and two OSCE Summits later, that publication has become outdated. Moreover, its usefulness had always been limited due to its purely chronological structure and the absence of an index. In the year of the 10th anniversary of the OSCE/ODIHR, the OSCE’s main institution dealing with the human dimension, I am pleased to present to the public a completely revised compilation of OSCE human dimension commitments, which contains not only an update of the chronological part, but also, for the first time ever, a thematic part listing all relevant human dimension commitments topic-by-topic. I am convinced that this publication represents a much-needed, user-friendly and practical tool for governments, OSCE personnel and the general public to easily access OSCE commitments on specific topics, as well as chronologically. OSCE Human Dimension Commitments xi