About
The OSC Staff Rights and Justice Initiative exists to help staff raise issues, understand shared concerns, and support respectful engagement with leadership and relevant stakeholders.
The OSC Staff Rights and Justice Initiative (SRJI) represents the collective concerns and shared interests of former and current OSC staff affected by the Organization’s closure and the prolonged non-payment of salaries and other contractual entitlements. The Initiative serves as a trusted platform to document verified information, promote the protection of staff rights, engage with relevant stakeholders, and pursue all appropriate lawful avenues to support a fair, timely, and equitable resolution.
The Staff Rights and Justice Initiative (SRJI), established by affected OSC staff, aims to provide a united voice for justice, accountability, and the protection of staff rights. It serves as a platform through which staff members coordinate their efforts and, in a spirit of community solidarity, collectively advocate for the recognition and fulfilment of their legitimate rights, including outstanding salaries, benefits, and contractual entitlements that have remained unpaid for up to 16 months.
The most important and relevant stakeholders for the affected OSC staff and SRJI are as follows:
- The Secretary-General and Head of Administration, who have made or implemented administrative decisions affecting staff, their families and children
- The General Assembly,
- The Host Country (Ethiopia) government,
- Diplomatic missions, Embassies, permanent missions of the Member States, Founding States and non-member States in Addis Ababa and elsewhere
- Representations of international organizations based in Addis Ababa,
- Journalists and media organizations to bring public attention to the issue
- Civil society organizations, labour and human rights organizations.
- Associate Members and academic and research institutions that partnered with OSC such as the International Cooperation Group of Brazilian Universities (GCUB)
- The broader public and professional community interested in accountability and justice in international organizations
Legal Memorial and Evidentiary Report: The Humanitarian Crisis and Institutional Failure of the Organisation of Southern Cooperation (OSC)
Historical Genesis, Institutional Architecture, and Global Mandate
The historical origin of the Organisation of Southern Cooperation (OSC, osc.org), erstwhile Organisation of Educational Cooperation (OEC), is rooted in a collective geopolitical effort by countries from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific islands to construct an independent framework for South-South solidarity. The organization was formally established on January 29, 2020, during the International Summit on Balanced and Inclusive Education held in the Republic of Djibouti. This founding summit culminated in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Balanced and Inclusive Education (UDBIE) and the signing of the Constitutive Charter of the OSC. The organization was designed to serve as an instrument of intellectual, technical, and financial cooperation, aiming to contribute to the equitable and just social transformation of societies by promoting balanced and inclusive education.
The Constitutive Charter of the OSC officially entered into force on May 18, 2021, after reaching the statutory threshold of ten founding state signatories submitting their respective Instruments of Acceptance. This triggered the convening of the first General Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, from December 6 to 8, 2021, where Sheikh Manssour Bin Mussallam (a Saudi national and a Swiss national) who had previously presided over the Education Relief Foundation (ERF), his personal foundation in Geneva, was unanimously elected as the first Secretary-General for an extraordinary, non-renewable six-year mandate. Mr. Manssour Bin Mussallam also became the lender to the OSC by committing to provide in effect USD 20 million soft loan without interest to Member States to be returned in instalments over the next biennium budget cycles.
Endowed with full international juridical personality, the OSC was granted the capacity to contract, acquire and dispose of property, and institute legal proceedings. The Secretariat established its permanent headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leveraging the city’s diplomatic status as the seat of the African Union to foster transregional integration and represent the interests of the “Greater South”.