Prague Picked as Base for Europe Secretariat

The city of Prague has been selected as the headquarters for the new secretariat of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, The Times learned Friday.

The creation of the secretariat--which diplomatic sources say is expected to be small, with no more than six to 10 members, and “flexible”--will be approved at the 34-nation CSCE summit meeting of East and West leaders in Paris next week.

The Czechoslovakia-based secretariat will oversee a series of future CSCE forums: summit meetings every other year and a foreign ministers’ meeting at least once a year.

At next week’s three-day Paris summit, the leaders, including President Bush, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, will also sign a declaration calling for broad political and economic freedoms.

Thatcher calls the charter of human rights a post-Cold War Magna Charta, after the document that spelled out British individual freedoms almost 800 years ago.

While Thatcher faces the unlikely prospect of being deposed as prime minister by her own Conservative Party in a vote Tuesday, while she is in Paris, she is not expected to resign, if voted out, until her return to England on Wednesday.

The final declaration in Paris will spell out in “hard” language, a diplomatic source said, the right of everyone to “participate in free and fair elections, to own property alone or in association, and to exercise individual enterprise.”

As such, the Paris declaration will emphasize the rights of the individual rather than the state.

“This is how the final document differs from the Final Act signed in Helsinki in 1975,” said a senior Foreign Office official, referring to the conference in Finland that established the CSCE as an East-West forum on security and other matters.

The summit will also establish a so-called Conflict Resolution Center, which will be in Vienna and will attempt to arbitrate international disputes in Europe, diplomatic sources said.

Further, the Paris declaration will establish an office, possibly in Warsaw, to monitor elections in Europe.

And the summit will also provide for a parliamentary assembly of some sort, which would comprise legislators from member states, diplomats said.

But sources insisted that the summit will not invest the CSCE with any major security dimension--which had been sought by Gorbachev and other East European leaders, who would like to see the CSCE supersede NATO, the Western alliance.

In Paris on Monday, just before the CSCE talks open, the 16 members of NATO and the six countries that form the disintegrating Warsaw Pact will sign a wide-ranging agreement limiting conventional arms in Europe.