Over the last years, and most recently during the October 2012 and January 2013 part-sessions, the Parliamentary Assembly has rightly discussed the very serious problem of political prisoners.
In particular, during the debates in plenary sittings, there was a common interest to assess the situation of political prisoners in all member States of the Council of Europe, starting from the definition of political prisoners recently approved by the Assembly itself.
The Assembly should therefore ban the arrest, conviction, imprisonment of citizens of the Council of Europe member States because of their personal political views.