4 ODIHR Annual Report 2011 OSCE/Curtis Budden Overview by the ODIHR Director Perhaps the most significant developments in 2011 for the OSCE and its comprehensive concept of security did not even take place within the OSCE region. The events that have come to be known as the “Arab Spring” reaffirmed, in their own way, the importance of one dimension of this concept of security — the human dimension. Occurring across the Mediterranean Sea from the OSCE’s southern “border”, the Arab Spring was of direct importance for the Organization for at least three reasons. First, from the very beginning, in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the OSCE participating States affirmed “the relationship which exists, in the broader context of world security, between security in Europe and security in the Mediterranean area”. Second, in the intervening years this relationship has been reflected in the OSCE granting a special status to its Mediterranean Partners for Co-operation: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. It was in the spirit of this partnership that Khadija Chérif, Secretary General of the International Federation for Human Rights and a prominent human rights defender from Tunisia, was invited to deliver the keynote address to the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM) in Warsaw — the largest human rights event in Europe in 2011. In her address, Chérif stressed that the events in Tunisia and Egypt were the natural consequence of the systematic suppression of human rights and the marginalization and harassment of civil society. In doing so, Chérif highlighted the third reason why the Arab Spring was of vital importance to the OSCE, in that it confirmed the universality of people’s aspirations for “dignity, freedom and respect for human rights” — the very concepts that lay at the heart of the OSCE’s human dimension. From time to time we have heard from the authorities in different OSCE participating States arguments of the same character that have been used to justify authoritarian rule elsewhere in the world: that cultural or historical differences meant that certain people needed “strong leaders” and weren’t “ready” for democratic systems that guaranteed their human rights. But the Arab Spring shattered these notions and highlighted the relevance of the OSCE commitments in this area, most recently re-affirmed in the Astana Commemorative Declaration of 2010, where the leaders of OSCE States, convinced “that the inherent dignity of the individual is at the core of comprehensive security”, reiterated “that human rights and fundamental freedoms are inalienable, and that their protection and promotion is our first responsibility”.