(osce) - The elected leadership of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly today unanimously recommended that the Assembly's top meeting in 2008, the Annual Session, be held in Kazakhstan.
"The OSCE is an Organization for all of its 56 participating States. We in the Parliamentary Assembly look forward to holding this major meeting in Kazakhstan and increasing the involvement of Central Asian states fully in all of our activities," said OSCE PA President Goran Lennmarker of Sweden, reports Trend.
The Assembly's elected leadership, the Bureau, made its recommendation today upon the invitation of Kazakhstan. The decision to hold the 2008 Annual Session in early July in Almaty will be formally decided by the Assembly's Standing Committee of Heads of Delegations, which will meet in February 2007.
During Annual Sessions, the 320 Members of Parliaments from North America, Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia who make up the OSCE PA hold debates and issue recommendations.
The 2008 meeting will be the 17th Annual Session of the Assembly. Recent meetings have been held in Brussels and Washington, DC. Ukraine will host the 2007 meeting in Kyiv.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE, created by the CSCE Summit in Paris in 1990, is the parliamentary dimension of the Organization. The primary task of the Assembly is to facilitate inter-parliamentary dialogue, an important aspect of the overall effort to meet the challenges of democracy throughout the OSCE area.
The Bureau was meeting in Brussels a day ahead of the start of the OSCE Ministerial Council meeting. Today's recommendation is separate from Kazakhstan's bid to chair the OSCE in 2009, which will be discussed during Ministerial Council.