Madame Moderator, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I speak on behalf of Human Rights Watch, Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, and Amnesty International.

As international human rights nongovernmental organizations, an important part of our work is to raise awareness about, and trigger action to address, human rights violations worldwide.

Recognizing anti-Semitism as a serious human rights violation, we also recognize our own responsibility to take on this issue as part of our work. It should not be left to Jewish groups alone to highlight this issue and to appeal to the international community to address it. We are firmly committed to joining their ongoing efforts and to helping to bring problems of anti-Semitism into the overall human rights discourse.

We welcome the OSCE’s holding a specific meeting on this long-neglected issue. We hope that it will not be a one-time occurrence, but rather the beginning of a long-term, sustained effort on the part of participating states – and OSCE as an institution – to monitor and combat discrimination and violence faced by Jewish communities throughout the OSCE region.

We will eagerly await the conclusions of this meeting, and those of the series of other, upcoming OSCE meetings in the framework of which anti-Semitism will be addressed – the July supplementary human dimension implementation meeting on religious freedom, the September conference on racism and intolerance, and the October Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in Warsaw – to see what concrete measures participating states are prepared to commit themselves to in order to combat anti-Semitism in their respective countries.

In this context, let me bring your attention to the recommendations put forward to this conference by the seminar organized by the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights earlier this week, which call on participating states to, inter alia, reaffirm their commitments made in Copenhagen in 1990 to condemn racial and ethnic hatred, including anti-Semitism, and to undertake effective follow up measures to demonstrate these commitments in practice. These recommendations provide a number of concrete ideas for specific steps that participating states should undertake. We call on the OSCE and its participating states to take these into account and to leave this meeting with a firm commitment to combat anti-Semitism.