Why Switzerland must put human rights at the core of the OSCE

In 2026 Switzerland will chair the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). This presents an opportunity to refocus the organisation on one of its core missions: a rules-based security centred on human rights, argue human rights advocate Eleonora Mongelli and Florian Irminger, president of the Geneva-based Progress & Change Action Lab.

Twelve years after its 2014 chairmanship, the context could hardly be more challenging. The OSCE, a security organisation comprising 57 states, turns 50 amid Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, deep divisions among participating states, and a sustained assault on the organisation’s human rights commitments with the raise of illiberal ideologies and autocrats settling ever more firmly into the region’s political landscape.

Additionally, instability in neighbouring regions such as Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, generates migration pressures, cross-border security repercussions, in addition to heightened geopolitical competition, particularly from emerging powers like China. The spread of hybrid threats, combining military, cyber and disinformation tactics, will further destabilise parts of the OSCE region, undermining trust, weakening institutions, and fuelling internal divisions.

A particularly alarming emerging threat is transnational repression. OSCE participating states – primarily Russia, Tajikistan, and Turkey – target dissidents abroad through surveillance, intimidation, coercion, and even physical attacks. These practices directly undermine human rights, democratic norms, and internal stability. Much of this repressive toolkit has been imported from China, as Switzerland recently documented.

To fulfil its mission in this environment, the OSCE must necessarily adopt an anticipatory and proactive approach, enhancing its capacity for early warning and strategic foresight.

Swiss presidency: an opportunity to resist authoritarianism

Switzerland will chair the OSCE in 2026. This comes as the country’s Foreign Policy Strategy 2024–27External link and Guidelines on Democracy 2025–28External link set a clear direction: democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are not optional values but pillars of security. This is also the OSCE’s founding vision, spelled out in the Helsinki Final Act and the Paris Charter, where security is grounded in rules, rights and accountable governance.

Yet, the OSCE’s “human dimension” is under siege. Authoritarian actors increasingly weaponise international law and consensus rules to shield repression, block oversight, and strip away mechanisms that hold states to account. The risk is an OSCE reduced to managing differences quietly, keeping the most sensitive topics off the table to preserve a fragile appearance of unity or survival. That would be the opposite of rules-based security.

Switzerland’s presidency offers an opportunity to resist this slide. That means ensuring that existing commitments are actively applied and recalled, even when politically inconvenient.

In practice, this requires robust political and financial support for the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). Its work includes election observation, human rights monitoring, and public reporting. With proper backing, ODIHR can prevent and respond effectively to new threats that no single state can address alone.

It also means ensuring that issues such as democratic backsliding, attacks on human rights defenders, security sector governance, and restrictions on civic space are debated openly in Vienna, where the OSCE is based. These concerns must not be bargained away behind closed doors.

This approach is fully in line with Switzerland’s democracy guidelines, which call for “diplomacy for democracy” and recognise that safeguarding the rule of law and human rights abroad is essential to Switzerland’s own security. It also reflects lessons from decades of security sector reform: good governance, participation, and civic space are not luxuries – they are the most effective armour against instability.

Staying relevant

There is a broader strategic risk. If the OSCE is seen as paralysed or irrelevant, states may turn to looser, non-rule-based forums, such as the European Political Community, where no shared rule standards guide behaviour. The OSCE is different. Its dialogue is anchored in agreed principles, making it one of the most effective mechanisms for conflict prevention and accountability. Dialogue without rules is not security. It is drift.

Expectations should be realistic, yet the swift evolution of the security environment, marked by complex and interconnected threats, demands decisive leadership from the next OSCE executive structures.

The Swiss presidency will not resolve the OSCE’s geopolitical deadlock. It can however keep the organisation’s normative gains visible, protect the human rights and democracy pillar of European security, recognise and protect democracy and human rights defenders, and show that there is no true security without rights. As the OSCE marks its 50^th anniversary, that would be a meaningful legacy.

Switzerland must prepare for a range of very different scenarios, writes the former secretary general, Thomas Greminger:

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ds

The views expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect those of Swissinfo.