23/06/2021 | 18:01:40 Thank you, Madam President. Many years ago, in the 1990s, when I was a young activist I took part in international projects aimed at facilitating the repatriation of Crimean Tatars. Crimean Tatars were only among three peoples who were deported by Stalin in the mid 1940s and were not allowed to return under Khrushchev's rule in the mid-1950s. So Crimean Tatars started returning back only on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Other researchers predicted serious bloody conflicts... 22/06/2021 | 12:47:37 Thank you. I believe that this is exactly the type of issues which our Assembly should discuss. This is a fundamental problem. The need to respond to this challenge of the pandemic highlighted one of the major problems in the field of fundamental human rights that our Assembly deals with: How far European societies are prepared to go in sacrificing their human rights and individual freedoms to defend other people, to protect lives and the health of other people. And how far democracies can go... 21/06/2021 | 19:50:31 Yes. Thank you. I actually prefer six reports about the rights of minorities for this Assembly and the resolutions were adopted within the last 20 years. I actually used to be, before entering politics, a minority rights activists and I defended the minorities. I don't know what a political minority is. We don't have any documents about the rights of political minorities. I belong to the opposition and a political minority in my parliament. Very often the parliament takes decisions which I... 21/06/2021 | 19:40:36 Yes, thank you, Madam President. Again I would like to stress that these politicians were not convicted for corruption. They were not accused of corruption, and the verdict does not mention corruption at all. This amendment is simply irrelevant. With regard to embezzlement you can find this in the report, but exactly the amount of losses is not mentioned in the verdict. Yes, embezzlement is criminally punishable in every Council of Europe member state. But, in these states usually when a... 21/06/2021 | 19:23:58 This is the only amendment from the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination whose vision unfortunately I cannot agree. The matter is that, as we discussed, the organisation of an unconstitutional referendum was explicitly decriminalised several years ago. This is really very important not to allow to criminalise it de facto again. So because these Catalan politicians were convicted under different articles on sedition, and when reforming this article it's necessary to make it in such a... 21/06/2021 | 18:59:42 Dear Madam President, I will try to be as brief as possible. Madam BAKOYANNIS and Mister HOWELL, I never said that the situation in Spain and Turkey is identical. It's absolutely clear, both from the text of my explanatory memorandum and from the text of suggested draft resolution. Words or deeds, statements or deeds, sorry colleagues, what are our deeds as politicians? These are statements and votes and nothing else. This is what we are doing on a daily basis. Everybody agrees that convicted... 21/06/2021 | 17:55:36 Madam president, this report before you deals with the core principles upheld by the Council of Europe: freedom of speech and assembly of democratically elected politicians. The first question is why just Spain and Turkey? The choice of countries covered in this report was made in the motion for a resolution underlined by my mandate, not by myself. Spain and Turkey are obviously two very different countries, with different legal cultures and problems, but they have something in common: a... 22/04/2021 | 11:28:22 Thank you, Mr President. I would like to commend our rapporteur, Mr MAIRE, in particular for his tireless efforts to maintain dialogue with our Russian colleagues. And I deeply regret that this dialogue, diplomatically speaking, is far from being as constructive as we would like to. Colleagues, This is not a political issue. As many speakers in this debate have pointed out, this is a matter of respect to key principles of our organizations. This is a purely a legal issue. Russian colleagues... 21/04/2021 | 12:41:25 Mr President, Belarus is not yet a member state of the Council of Europe but it is a part of Europe and we cannot stay indifferent to gross and systematic human rights violations which occur there on a regular basis. Indeed, as many speakers in this debate said, we must strongly deplore what is going on in Belarus. In my view statements are not enough. We must ensure that all those who are personally guilty of these violations, all those perpetrators, must be held to account. The report by Ms... 19/04/2021 | 18:01:48 I congratulate the rapporteur Ms Elvira KOVÁCS for this very important report. Back in the 1990s the Council of Europe and our Assembly in particular played a key role in establishing a modern framework for minority protection. Indeed it was our resolution which triggered the adoption of the first-ever legally binding instrument on minority rights: the framework convention. For years, the Council of Europe played a leading role both in the standard setting, monitoring and promotion of the...