Ladies and Gentlemen, In my work as OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, I constantly advocate solutions that promote the integration of minority groups into the wider society, while at the same time respecting the minority’s right to a separate linguistic, ethnic or religious identity. In all cases this requires very practical measures. Many of the causes of interethnic tensions are deep-rooted and require not just political or legislative action but also the sustained deployment of significant resources, for example, in the fields of education, political participation or the media. Providing support through programmes and projects has therefore become an important part of my office’s activities. The emphasis of these projects is always on early action and prevention of conflict, and they aim to close gaps that otherwise would not necessarily be filled. Given the multidimensional nature of the challenge to promote the effective political participation of minorities, the HCNM projects are necessarily wide-ranging. Let me give you a few examples. It is my experience that adequate and regular access to the media and national news constitutes an important means through which minority communities can participate in the public life of their country. Yet, minority-language media broadcasting is often limited to small outlets in minority populated regions that focus on local events, but offer little in terms of national or international news. The sometimes limited command of the State language in minority populated regions in itself limits access to nationally produced news coverage. Minorities then turn mainly to the media outlets of their “kin-State”, which precludes them from regular and accurate information about on-going developments in their country. In one such region of an OSCE participating State, I have therefore helped to set up and equip two local TV stations. The project involves the training of local journalists and technical personnel in reporting techniques and using modern equipment, and managers in the running of the TV companies as effective businesses. Both TV companies started producing their own weekly news bulletins in January 2005. Local news in minority languages is now broadcast almost every day. At the same time these stations rebroadcast State-language national news programmes with minority language subtitling. When asked about the importance of these programmes, 71.9 per cent of the people polled responded: “very important” and pointed out that they would lose a unique source of information should