02/10/2024 | 18:49:12 Thank you, President, and thank you, colleagues, for your important contributions. I would like to express my gratitude to the Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) authorities for the co-operation, all the political parties, including the members of parliament in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). I would like to thank you very much for your co-operation while we have been preparing this report after six years. Don't forget, this has been quite a long process, but I think it... 02/10/2024 | 18:06:50 Alexander NIKOLOSKI has been appointed as member of government in North Macedonia. I have the honour to congratulate him from this place and I also have the honour of presenting our report on Bosnia and Herzegovina with his full support. Mister NIKOLOSKI and I consider that the discussion of this report is very timely because many developments have occurred over the last two years in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In some of our countries, these developments went unnoticed among the dramatic flow of... 02/10/2024 | 16:03:28 Thank you, Mister President. And dear colleagues, I look forward to co-operating with you as well and the Secretary General. Dear colleagues, I would like to advise this discussion to be extremely cautious. I don't think that we are in a situation where we could say that we are moving on chartered waters. This is the first time of this type of decision in the life of the Parliamentary Assembly. And even now it is not without very serious conclusions. I believe that we should pay attention to... 24/06/2024 | 16:02:52 Dear President, dear colleagues. I would like to congratulate Ms Elisabetta GARDINI and Mr Alfred HEER for their Reports. As I mentioned not long ago, it is really great to be back in this Chamber again, which still smells good and new. And I would like to congratulate our Secretary General and our President that you have been able to manage this hard period moving between the old and new locations in the European Parliament. And I think it was also important that we have been able to save... 24/06/2024 | 12:11:27 Mister President, dear colleagues, Mister President Sobotka, welcome to our circles. Your performance just a few seconds ago proves that we politicians are also made up of human beings. You are a musician as well, a very famous and respected artist in Austria, and at the same time, you are the president of your country. We are very honoured that you have accepted our invitation and, as you can see, we have got a very unique momentum celebrating the 75th anniversary of our Organisation and... 16/04/2024 | 18:00:14 Thank you very much, Mister President. The European Conservatives Group and Democratic Alliance, in principle, supports Kosovo becoming a member of the Council of Europe. We appreciate the efforts of the Kosovan people in the past decades towards democracy and Europe, since the fight of Ibrahim Rugova. However, we have three reasons why we cannot support the report in front of us. The three reasons are the following: The first one is that Kosovo has not fulfilled its own commitments – only... 23/01/2024 | 17:58:22 Thank you very much, Madam President. I would like to underline, dear colleagues, that we are here because of the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October against Israel. Yesterday, in the Committee we discussed the word "barbarism". There was an amendment which suggested that "barbarism" should be deleted. And the answer from the Committee was, "No, we don't delete it because it was barbarism". I would say the most barbaric terror attack in recent modern history was what happened on 7 October in... 22/01/2024 | 16:03:44 Thank you. Dear colleagues, First of all about the Serbian elections. I would like to agree with our rapporteur, who said that there have been irregularities in the elections, but these irregularities have been so-called "normal" irregularities. I think it is important to all of us to mediate the message to our Serbian colleagues that we regard the elections as legitimate elections. As far as the party political interpretations are concerned, I hope that we stop questioning elections just... 11/10/2023 | 16:00:09 Mister President, honourable Members, On Saturday morning, we woke up to terrible news and horrible images of violence flaring up in the Middle East, again. Comparable to the acts of Daesh, Hamas' war of terror has spared no one. Families, women, and children were shot dead in the open street in broad daylight, and almost 300 people were massacred at a youth party. Israel was attacked from the air and the sea, and on land as well. Hamas' terrorism has shown once again that it knows no borders... 09/10/2023 | 16:24:59 Mister President, dear colleagues, Reality has again intervened in the programme of the Parliamentary Assembly autumn session. Israel is bleeding incomparably since 1973, the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago exactly: it is not an accident. This was a planned and very barbarically executed operation. We need to condemn the Hamas terrorism in the most explicit way. There is no justification of this brutality which we are experiencing. How about the peace process, dear colleagues. The Abraham Accords...