Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Thank you for the invitation to the second UN Forum on Minority Issues. This gathering provides an invaluable opportunity to discuss the situation and concerns of minorities around the globe and should be fully utilized. Here, governments and civil society – and first and foremost minorities – can discuss their achievements and concerns openly and on an equal footing. I see this meeting as a rare opportunity to review the challenges we face when endeavouring to build cohesive societies. The central theme of this year’s Forum, Effective Political Participation of Minorities, is crucial in building and preserving cohesive and stable societies. The essence of participation, of democracy in fact, is involvement, both in terms of having the opportunity to make a substantive contribution to decision-making processes and in terms of the impact of those contributions. The more inclusive a system is, the more representative it is. The closer we bring the decision-making to those affected by involving them, the better the policies and laws we make and the more likely they are to be accepted. This is not only a question of implementing international standards, but also of good governance. Since the establishment of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (or HCNM for short), my predecessors and I have witnessed, on a daily basis and in a wide range of geographic, cultural, linguistic and political constellations, what are the challenges we are faced with when trying to achieve effective political participation of minorities. Minorities are often excluded from decision-making processes, even in matters that directly affect them such as the allocation of budgets, the structure and language of the education system or measures to support their identity. Even in cases where they are allowed to speak out, their concerns may be ignored and their legitimate demands cast aside. Minorities are very often underrepresented, not only at different levels of government, but also in essential public services such as the police, the judiciary and the civil service. This is an acute problem particularly in States in which a particular ethnic, linguistic or religious group dominates the State organs and deliberately excludes other groups through various means. In other cases, the exclusion of minorities from political participation may not be deliberate, but rather the result of more practical obstacles such as a lack of knowledge of the State language, geographic isolation or imbalances in the education system.