Helsinki — Fifty years to the week after 35 leaders signed the Helsinki Final Act in this city, more than a thousand people from 70 countries gathered in Finlandia Hall on 31 July to ask what remains of it. Russia, a signatory’s successor state, was not represented — and marked the anniversary, Ukraine’s foreign minister said, with a missile strike.
The Helsinki+50 conference, convened by Finland’s OSCE chairmanship under the motto ‘Respecting the legacy, preparing for the future’, was deliberately not a nostalgic exercise. Sixty per cent of participants were born after 1975 — a statistic the organisers cited proudly — and the programme mixed foreign ministers with youth delegates, civil society and scholars on questions from warfare to artificial intelligence.
The day’s central juxtaposition needed no stage management. As speakers recalled the Act’s principles — sovereignty, refraining from the threat or use of force — news arrived of a Russian strike on Kyiv. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, attending in person, told the hall that Russia had answered the Helsinki anniversary in the only language it currently uses.
President Alexander Stubb, whose predecessor Sauli Niinistö first proposed a Helsinki commemorative summit back in 2021, framed the stakes in Finnish terms: his country believed in the Helsinki process for five decades, hosted its founding document, and then joined NATO — not because the principles failed, he argued, but because one signatory abandoned them and the others failed to make abandonment costly.
Concretely, the conference launched a reflection process on the OSCE’s future: working strands on the organisation’s tools, its institutions and its relevance for a generation that has never known Europe without war in Ukraine. Recommendations are to feed into ministerial decisions later this year in Vienna.
The Final Act was signed on 1 August 1975 in this same hall — Leonid Brezhnev’s pen among the 35. Half a century later the chairs for Russia’s delegation stood empty, by choice of the organisers and of Moscow alike. Whether that empty chair is the anniversary’s verdict or merely its intermission is the question Helsinki+50 leaves for Vienna in December.
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