Athens, 1 December 2009

Ladies and gentlemen, Your Excellencies,

I would like to formally declare the seventeenth meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council open.

It’s with great pleasure that I welcome you all to the Ministerial Council in Athens. The Ministerial Council is the central decision-making and governing body of the OSCE between summits, and the central forum for political consultations within the OSCE. It is the most important annual event of our organisation. It offers an opportunity to take stock of our work, assess achievements and new challenges, and also introduce new policies and activities and provide guidelines at the ministerial level for the future activities of our organisation.

We have worked intensively to prepare a set of documents and decisions in key areas of our organisation’s work, and I sincerely hope that over the next two days we will find the necessary cooperative spirit to adopt these documents.

Let me wish you and all of us, for this seventeenth Ministerial Council meeting, fruitful, inspiring discussions here in Athens.

In welcoming you, let me now proceed to agenda item 2, the adoption of the agenda. You will find the draft agenda of this meeting, which has been forwarded to us by the Permanent Council, as Document MC.GAL/1/09. May I assume that we can now adopt this agenda? Thank you. The agenda is herewith adopted.

We shall now take up agenda item 3, which provides for the address by a representative of the host country. Under this item, I have the special honour to welcome in our midst His Excellency, the President of the Hellenic Republic, Mr. Karolos Papoulias, for his opening address. You have the floor, Your Excellency.