24/06/2019 | 16:34:11 Thank you Madam President. Last April this Assembly adopted by a three quarters majority the resolution or recommendation on Role and mission of the Parliamentary Assembly: main challenges for the future. Many of the adopted proposals are now already being implemented. The rest are waiting to be dealt with. We are on the right track colleagues. One of the adopted proposals was to inform national parliaments of Member states that they all have the obligation, on the basis of the statute of our... 11/04/2019 | 10:43:48 The Rules of Procedure are there to ensure free and fair functioning of our esteemed Assembly, so evaluating regularly whether rules still function or should be updated due to new developments is only wise; I say that to our colleague Mr Aleksander POCIEJ. I therefore thank Rapporteur Mr Egidijus VAREIKIS for his report. One of its main points is about the criteria for political groups. As we all know, political groups play a very important role in all the work of the Assembly, so we have to... 10/04/2019 | 19:23:14 I thank all colleagues who have participated in the debate. Many colleagues think, like me, that as we are at a crossroads, we need to find the way towards a better future and new ways to deal with the Assembly’s main challenges. I listened with great respect to those who are worried that this is not a way towards better solutions. There are no guarantees. This proposal does not guarantee that we will solve our problems. It is a roadmap that could help our Assembly to overcome problems and... 10/04/2019 | 16:58:24 This year, we will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Council of Europe. In our June part-session, this Assembly will explicitly recall the important decision made seven decades ago to create a unique intergovernmental Organisation, with a serious inter-parliamentary dimension, to achieve greater unity in Europe by promoting and protecting the rule of law, human rights and democracy in its Member States. At the very moment when almost the whole of Europe was in ruins brave politicians took... 08/04/2019 | 12:25:39 Thank you, Madam President, for your inspiring speech at the beginning of this part-session. I thank both rapporteurs for their reports, and I thank Mr Claude KERN also for his excellent chairing of the election observation mission to the Republic of Moldova. Members of the Group of the Unified European Left thought that, although a lot of things are going wrong in the Republic of Moldova, our election mission performed very well. I therefore I pay tribute to the leadership of that mission... 24/01/2019 | 15:39:39 I thank our co-rapporteurs Ms Marianne MIKKO and Mr Nigel EVANS for this report and resolution. It would have been great if we had not had to ask for this urgent debate on the situation of opposition politicians in our Member State, Turkey. It would have been great if, after the lifting of the state of emergency and the end of the Turkish derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights, Turkey had normalised the position of politicians who do not belong to the ruling coalition – but... 24/01/2019 | 10:48:54 I thank our rapporteur, Mr Andreas NICK, for his balanced report on this delicate issue. I am happy that we were able to change the original title of the debate, which in my opinion was far too aggressive, to a factual title. I applaud the rapporteur for doing what I think a report and resolution should do: describing what has happened and proposing what could happen in order to overcome the problems. Too often we in this Assembly are busy creating problems when we should be coming up with... 23/01/2019 | 12:29:33 Mr President, I fully support your call to recognise it as the shared responsibility of the Parliamentary Assembly and the Committee of Ministers to overcome our internal problems, which have persisted for too long and have cost this Organisation and especially our citizens too much. We are happy that the Finnish presidency is now leading this process, but what role could you play as head of state of Finland, an honest broker country? More concretely, will you meet President Putin, or have... 21/01/2019 | 12:44:08 It is good to see you again in the Chair, Madam President. On behalf of the Group of the Unified European Left, I endorse the reports presented by Mr Ian LIDDELL-GRAINGER, Mr Andrej HUNKO and Mr Aleksander POCIEJ, as I did in the Bureau. What I do not endorse are the additional remarks made by my good friend Ian with regard to the Secretary General and his responsibility for the financial problems we are in. Ian, dear colleagues, only two member States are really responsible for the mess we... 25/01/2017 | 12:29:39 Thank you very much, President Iohannis, for your most interesting speech, in which you elaborated on the relationship between Romania and Moldova. Your country was the first to recognise Moldova, but since then the relationship has been, to put it mildly, rather complex. At this moment, your ideas about the future of Moldova and of EU integration are quite different from those of newly elected President Dodon, who is not in favour of the association agreement with the European Union and...