01/10/2024 | 16:53:04 Thank you very much. You will be delighted to hear, ladies and gentlemen, but I don't really have a great deal more to add. I do have some observations. I think, if the efforts over the years of organisations like this, in putting together human rights legislation and standards for refugees and migrants were mirrored by the same degree of effort and co-operation and resources by nation states and groups of nation states into prevention, we would not find ourselves in the situation we are in... 01/10/2024 | 15:45:52 Thank you very much, Mister President. Dear colleagues and Commissioner for Human Rights, it's a privilege to speak before you today about some of the issues around migrant smuggling which are fuelling the angry and often divisive dialogue of the deaf in our national and international political debates, particularly in this year of elections. This report aims to contribute in a calm and reasoned way PACE's input to the current discussions on migrant smuggling across Europe. The smuggling of... 27/06/2024 | 12:01:19 Thank you, President. I'd like to start off by thanking the rapporteur for a very timely report. I first had the pleasure of going to Ukraine as part of the monitoring team from the Council of Europe in 2019. I went there three times. I was there with the pre-election for the first round of the campaign and for the second. And it was a very memorable occasion. I remember in particular the large amount of IDPs that there were and the very smooth way in which they were dealt with in each of the... 20/06/2023 | 16:12:55 Thank you very much. First of all, I'd like to congratulate the rapporteur on doing an excellent job. I would like to salute Ms TSIKHANOUSKAYA for all she's doing. I wonder if Mr Sergei Tikhanovsky realises quite how lucky he is to have you as his wife. This is important to talk about, because Russia is culturally, politically, economically, and militarily strangling Belarus. And the diaspora of Belarusians who are in exile is essential for keeping the spirit of the real Belarus alive. They... 22/06/2022 | 10:35:48 Thank you very much. First of all, I would like to thank Ms Petra BAYR and Ms Ute STEYER in particular for a very interesting discourse. I have three reasons for speaking to you here this morning. First, the principle itself, which I think is self-evident. Antisemitism is clearly wrong. Secondly, personal: on my mother's side, one of my great grandfathers, in the wake of Kristallnacht in 1938, put his name at the head of a petition to raise money to get Kindertransport children out of Germany... 27/04/2022 | 17:28:14 Thank you, Mr President. Those of us who have been listening to this debate will have heard a series of speeches by our Ukrainian colleagues, who arguably are the people in this room who have the most skin in the game, in some cases, dead skin not live skin. Just imagine that it was your country that was being invaded, that it was your people who are being killed every day. This is the beginning of a series of amendments that are trying to make explicit – what I hope we really mean in this... 25/04/2022 | 18:19:17 I would like to start by thanking Mr Dimitri HOUBRON very much for a very timely and comprehensive report. This is a global problem. It affects us all, every nation, but it is global. The only way we can tackle this is by tackling it globally as well as nationally. To prioritise either over the other will not and does not work. The online world has no borders. It recognises no borders, it respects no borders. What it does respect is profitability. While welcoming this report, I do feel it's... 28/09/2021 | 19:16:05 Thank you. I shall try and do my best to represent men. I would like to congratulate the rapporteur on a report which is extremely useful, not only in helping to define what constitutes "honour"-based abuse, but it also illustrates how much further we need to go to tackle it effectively. I think we can all agree that "honour"-based abuse in the 21st century is a disgrace. But it is an unfortunate fact that most of us would struggle to describe it in great detail or to lay out clear strategies... 21/04/2021 | 12:27:47 Yes can you hear me? I congratulate the two rapporteurs on two excellent and uncomfortably timely reports. I previously spoke on Belarus during our January 2020 session – a coronavirus lifetime ago – to debate on the progress report on the November 2019 parliamentary elections. The PACE monitoring mission was headed by Lord David BLENCATHRA and I had the privilege of being one of its members. That progress report informs and echoes the first of the two reports we are discussing today. I... 27/01/2020 | 15:51:40 I had the great privilege to be part of the monitoring team to Belarus and I'd like to thank my fellow monitors, the support team and my noble friend, Lord BLENCATHRA. This was the second monitoring mission I've had the privilege of being on in 2019 and they couldn't be more different. The first was the Ukraine, the presidential election, President TRUMP's new telephone pal. There was a high level of engagement, it was a genuine contest and there was a real sense of change. Belarus, by...