In July 2025, forty-one OSCE participating States, in cooperation with Ukraine, invoked the OSCE Moscow Mechanism to examine the treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) by the Russian Federation. This activation reaffirmed the mechanism’s continuing importance as an instrument for addressing serious violations of international law. Embedded within the OSCE framework, the Moscow Mechanism allows participating States…

Introduction When, in 1991, the Participating States of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CBSE) at their meeting in Moscow established the so-called Moscow Mechanism, nobody could have anticipated the pivotal role that this mechanism would have some three decades later in holding to account its “country of origin”, the Russian Federation. Yet, this…

Before Spring 2022, only the real connoisseurs of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were familiar with the so-called Moscow Mechanism enabling any OSCE participating State to request the establishment of an ad hoc expert mission to investigate specific questions related to the OSCE human dimension. In the first thirty years of…