November 16 marks the 14th anniversary of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

On November 16, 2006, members of the Council of the Interparliamentary Assembly of the CIS Member States that are members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization held a meeting in St Petersburg that decided to establish the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly.
Parliamentary interaction and cooperation within the CSTO dates back to 2000. In 2000, a session of the CST Collective Security Council in Bishkek formalized the status of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly as its parliamentary structure within the Collective Security Treaty. It was tasked with developing model laws and recommendations to align the laws of the Treaty's Member States.
In fact, the interaction began earlier, in 1999, when the Council of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of the CIS Member States adopted a special decision according to which the parliamentary delegations representing the CIS Member States of the Collective Security Treaty (CST) began to consider legal matters related to the implementation of the Treaty within the IPA CIS.
And in 2000, regular meetings began to be held to discuss collective defence and security issues and to review documents aimed at its strengthening. In addition, the military and political situation in all collective-security regions was monitored. However, soon enough it became obvious that such a form of work was clearly insufficient, and the CST itself had already virtually transformed into an international security organization, which needed to be enshrined in law.
To adapt the Collective Security Treaty to the realities of regional and international security and to counter new challenges and threats, on May 14, 2002, the CST Moscow session decided to transform the Treaty into a fully-fledged international organization: the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
Four years later, the issue of formalizing the Organization’s parliamentary component also arose.
On June 23, 2006, the CSTO Minsk session deemed it necessary to develop CSTO’s parliamentary dimension within the framework of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly.
The Assembly was designed to ensure harmonization of national laws, develop model laws to solve CSTO’s statutory tasks and to organize cooperation on international and regional security issues.
Based on this decision, as well as on the CIS IPA Convention, at the proposal of Saidullo Hayrulloev, Chairman of the Majlisi Namoyandagon of the Majlisi Oli of the Republic of Tajikistan, the chairpersons of the parliaments of the CIS Member States of the CSTO adopted a resolution to establish the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO PA) on November 16, 2006.
As Saidullo Hayrulloev noted in his speech then, “in the past six years (since the beginning of work within the IPA CIS*), the Collective Security Treaty transformed into the Collective Security Treaty Organization: an active, dynamically developing organization that is gaining political weight both in the region and in the world, the one that already now is able to address many of its tasks of ensuring collective security.
By decision of the members of the Council of CSTO Member States, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization was headed by Boris Gryzlov, a member of the IPA CIS CSTO Council and Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation.
The procedural and institutional basis of the CSTO PA activities was defined by the Provisional Regulations on the Parliamentary Assembly of the CSTO, approved on March 30, 2007, at a session of the parliamentary delegations of the IPA CIS states that are members to the CSTO.
The tasks that were assigned to the CSTO PA and that the Organization still performs today, are fully reflected in Article 3 of the Provisional Regulations on the Parliamentary Assembly of the CSTO:
– discusses the matters of cooperation of the CSTO Member States in international, military and political, legal and other areas and sends its recommendations on these matters to the Collective Security Council, other CSTO bodies and parliaments, depending on the nature of the matter considered;
– considers issues entrusted to it by the CSTO Collective Security Council and sends its recommendations thereon to the Collective Security Council and other CSTO bodies, where applicable;
– adopts recommendations to approximate the legislation of the CSTO Member States in international, military and political, legal and other areas;
– adopts standard (model) legislative acts and sends them with appropriate recommendations to the parliaments of the CSTO Member States;
– adopts recommendations on the alignment of procedures of the CSTO Member States’ parliaments to ratify treaties concluded within the CSTO and (in the event a relevant decision having been taken by the CSTO Collective Security Council) other international treaties, whenever the CSTO Member States’ participation in such treaties is desirable in order to achieve their common goals set forth in the Charter of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (2002) and the Agreement on the Legal Status of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (2002);
– adopts recommendations to align the laws of the CSTO Member States with international treaties concluded by those states within the framework of the CSTO;
– facilitates the exchange of legal information among the CSTO Member States;
– interacts and cooperates with international parliamentary and other organizations, pursuant to its objectives;
– discusses other issues of inter-parliamentary cooperation.
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