Overview by the ODIHR Director ODIHR Director Janez Lenarcˇicˇ at the opening plenary session of the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting, Warsaw, 28 September. (OSCE/Piotr Markowski) 4 I am pleased to present ODIHR’s Annual Report for the year 2009. As the OSCE agenda was dominated by efforts, within the “Corfu process”, to restore confidence among participating States and move forward the dialogue on wider European security, ODIHR continued to work with governments and civil society across the region to assist with the implementation of commitments in the field of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. As the principal institution dealing with the “human dimension” of the OSCE, ODIHR was active in monitoring compliance by participating States with the commitments they have made and in providing support in closing implementation gaps. While monitoring activities, for example with regard to elections and hate crimes, covered the entire OSCE region, the Office focused its assistance projects particularly on participating States that expressed a genuine will to undertake reforms and make use of ODIHR’s expertise. During 2009, ODIHR observed or assessed 16 elections. These included the European Parliament elections, which presented a unique challenge in terms of developing a format allowing for the meaningful assessment of a major electoral event that, in effect, consisted of 27 separate, simultaneous national-level elections. Altogether, ODIHR deployed some 2,300 observers from 52 participating States. The Office also further broadened the geographic scope of its observation activities, with a number of missions to countries whose elections were assessed for the first time, such as Germany, Greece, Norway and Portugal. At the request of the OSCE Permanent Council, ODIHR also sent an expert team to assess the presidential election in Afghanistan and develop recommendations to improve future electoral processes. As in previous years, ODIHR conducted its election observation activities in close partnership with the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and other parliamentary partners. ODIHR’s democratization work was recalibrated in 2009 to maximize synergies with the Office’s electionrelated activities. This meant that key aspects of ODIHR’s democratization programmes — rule of law, population registration, legislative reviews, political party development, women’s participation — have been tied in more closely with follow-up to the Office’s election observation missions. The past year also saw the finalization of the first phase of a major project aimed at strengthening the capacity of national jurisdictions in the Western Balkans to adjudicate war crimes trials. Following a study on the needs of national judicial systems, completed in 2009, ODIHR Annual Report 2009