Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday said systemic shortcomings in Euro-Atlantic security had to be overcome in order to tackle global challenges such as terrorism, according to dpa. Lavrov was addressing leaders from the European Union, NATO, the Organization for Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) at the 2009 Annual Security Review Conference in Vienna. A year ago, faced with even greater NATO expansion into former Soviet states, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed the idea of a new legally binding European security treaty. The world is facing similar challenges to security since the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, Lavrov told the OSCE Permanent Council. "Today we are coming up against no less dangerous threats of a global nature and these challenges require genuine collective responses," Lavrov said. "However, to create the basis for seeking such responses we will have to tackle the systemic shortcomings which we have seen in Euro- Atlantic security," he added. "The most important systemic shortcoming remains the fact that in the past 20 years, we have not been able to work out guarantees for the principles of indivisible security." Lavrov welcomed the informal meeting of OSCE foreign ministers on the future of European security that is scheduled to take place in Corfu, Greece, at the weekend. "What is at stake is a fundamental security concept in the Euro- Atlantic area on the basis of co-operation," he said. Lavrov also proposed that the heads of key international organizations - OSCE, the CIS and the Collective Security Treaty Organization - meet to "to examine the security strategies of each of these organizations" as a first step toward cooperation. He also gave details of the proposal by Medvedev for a legally- binding treaty on European security, a key aspect of which is cooperation between states and organizations in facing new challenges.
