Speech of Prime Minister Edi Rama at the reception hosted by the OSCE Presence in Tirana, on the International Day of Human Rights:

Good evening everyone,

Honourable Speaker of the Assembly,

Excellencies Ambassadors,

Dear Florian,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In the early 90s, when I was just a freeman of this city, I would be surprised any time I was invited to celebrations of foreign representations attended by the government retinue. Back then, I would think of it as a caravan of in-laws who attended every celebration and visited every embassy to attend all social musts, without hiding the joy in front of a tray filled with every tempting product brought by freedom.

Later, when I became myself part of that caravan, I would always attend those celebrations with the fear of becoming like the people of this city, just as the Government’s in-laws seemed to me in those social musts, at a time when I hadn’t hocked yet my freedom on the hanger of my official dress.

Now that I am in this office, my presence is minimal and my desire to stop this provincial ritual, which reminds me of some descriptions by Kadare of foreign consulates celebrations in Albania in the 1910-1920, is maximal. To be honest, I haven’t had a better chance to make public this quarter-century botheration, which is not a secret to any of our international friends, than under the auspices of the OSCE where people may exercise the human right to say things. For under this auspices, even when we do not agree with each other we do not get upset at all, because we are not obliged to agree as happens for example with the European Union, where we often get upset with each other if we do not agree. For example, perhaps you can help me, but I do not remember any OSCE ambassador be called as an albanophobe by the government in Tirana, as it happened until recently with an EU Commissioner.

Anyhow, it was not to get rid of this botheration why, contrary to the opinion of the Prime Minister’s Office Protocol, I accepted the invitation of Florian, not only to attend but also to speak.

It is an honour for me that on this Day, our common friend, Florian Raunig, obviously the most consensual Albanian-speaking figure in our political life, asked me to addresses his guests. It is an honour because on this Day devoted to human rights worldwide, I have the opportunity not only to thank the OSCE on behalf of the Albanian Government, but also to reiterate the full commitment of this Government to the sustained growth of the freedom standards in Albania. There is no need to take time and explain, because we see the steady growth of the standards as a challenge to be won every day, without ever forgetting OSCE’s key role.

Baptized as Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which saw the sunlight in Helsinki for the first time in 1975, this organization grew quietly by the will of two strange “godfathers” who back then were fighting a strange war with each other, the United States of America and the Soviet Union.

From that shy Consultative Council, a child of the blocks of the Cold War, the Charter of Paris turned the OSCE in 1992 in a new institution, relevant for security and cooperation in Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This institution had the burden not only to narrow the many year-long gap of grudges and separations between Western and Eastern Europe, but also the historical task of pursuing democratic progress in countries where communist barbarity had caused a political, economical and cultural catastrophe.

I chose a quote from René Cassin, a sentence that could be the proper definition for anyone in the world who celebrates this important Day, but I believe it is at the same time the proper characterization of OSCE’s approach in all these years between unfinished Europe and accomplished Europe, in the increasingly legible absence of perfect Europe.

The hand-writer of the Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948, the witness of the Holocaust, said with his clear pessimism: “I haven’t been struggling for the triumph of justice for a long time, but I strive every day so that there is less injustice”.

At the time when both blocks planted the seedling of today’s OSCE, in 1975 when except for Enver Hoxha’s Albania all countries of Europe and NATO, from Moscow to Washington and from Lisbon to Warsaw, signed its birth certificate, very few thought that that fragile creature would have had a long life. I believe that whoever thought of this seedling as ephemeral, didn’t realize, in fact, that the motto of its life was since the very beginning “greater human dignity”, “more rights, consolidated gradually and in peace on both sides of the Wall.”

So, more rights, but not much more than that, or none. Even the sclerotic Soviet Union of Brezhnev had finally understood, back then, that the promotion of human dignity and debate for fundamental human rights was essentially a matter of collective security.

25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the era of suppression of human dignity seems to us very distant. But, on the other hand, it suffices to have a look of what is happening today in Ukraine and the Crimea, where people are suppressed and crushed between political farces and nationalist bayonets, to understand that peace and security are always questionable and inextricably linked to the dignity, freedom and human rights.

As witnesses, finally freed from electoral abnormal feats that were repeated boringly repeated for years, we now have the opportunity to highly appreciate the not always well understood nor always welcomed OSCE’s assistance in the long ordeal we had to go through until the liberation of the election.

Also, today we have the opportunity to appreciate the great usefulness of the OSCE in neighbouring Kosovo, where the organization’s assistance in defining the framework of minorities and their fair treatment has turned Kosovo into a European radiant example for the freedoms and rights of minorities.

At a moment when our Serb neighbour prepares to take over the OSCE chairmanship, we are offered one more instrument to do even more in the region, although perhaps not as much as Albanians would want. While internally, more than for arbitration already exceeded in time between right and left, the OSCE is precious to us for what it continues to convey us as expertise, opinion or even as advice through its profile that is probably low in relation to other partners in Albania, but it is certainly a complementary and very useful profile.

The OSCE has had since the very beginning, has even today and, I believe, it will always have a not light burden which recalls the burden of a bridge. And there is not a more appropriate place, I believe, to be exchanged and to exchange than this bridge, at the foot of which lie the liberties and human rights that the world celebrates today, assessing what has been achieved and trying to understand how much there is still to do.

I had never expected that, while I was speaking, opposition representatives would do nothing but listen. And this is something that can happen only under the auspices of the OSCE. So thank you, first of all to the opposition and then to everybody else.