13/10/2023 | 10:51:13 Thank you. This is not much of a debate, because it seems that we all seem to agree on a few basic tenants. I would like to underline the words of Mr Serhii SOBOLIEV. This is not just about Putin, this is happening in more parts of Europe. There are more parts of Europe where dictatorships do exist and where we as an organisation of democratic nations have looked away for too long. Mr Paul GAVAN pointed to Mr Aliyev. That dictatorship even seems to run in the family. There we have the same... 13/10/2023 | 10:06:26 Dear members, Dear Chairperson, What is the essence of democracy? The essence of democracy is that every now and then you change your elected official. The most important elected official in a presidential republic is the president. Today, we are discussing two items on that, the particular item on why Mr Putin can be president in Russia for more than 30 years, and thereby flout the Russian Constitution, and more in general, why you would need to, every now and then, change your president... 12/10/2023 | 18:25:47 Thank you, Madam Chair. Can we look at what's going on here? More than 100 000 people have been driven from their homes. The complete ethnic minority in Azerbaijan is no longer living in Nagorno-Karabakh. This was exactly what we wanted to prevent when both Armenia and Azerbaijan were admitted to the Council of Europe. They promised to use only peaceful means, and now the whole minority was forced to leave. Let's not make a mistake. This way they will not return. This, we treat it today, as... 11/10/2023 | 18:19:56 Thank you dear colleagues, Thank you for the comments on this work, and also thank you for the co-operation. Let me start with Mr Koloman BRENNER because that was the most interesting speech, because he doesn't know whether he's been spied on. It's exactly that chilling effect where you know that your government is using it, but you don't know whether the government is using it against you, which is the dangerous thing of this spyware being used. If we don't realise that here, then we are in... 11/10/2023 | 17:05:47 Thank you. Imagine you have your mobile phone, and imagine someone takes it over without you noticing it. So, there is no link you have to click on. And your mobile phone turns into a spyware of your own government or another government. It can actually listen in to what you do, can use your camera and knows what you're doing, it can search all your messages and all your emails, it can look at all your pictures. And if you use a little bit of AI, that spy can actually figure out that you're... 20/06/2023 | 17:25:41 Dear Ms Chairperson, dear colleagues. After the fall of communism, Poland emerged with a strong democratic will. It quickly joined the Council of Europe in 1991 and became an EU member in 2004. Unfortunately, Poland was the first EU member for which the Assembly opened a monitoring procedure, due to the concerns about the functioning of its democratic and rule-of-law institutions. And today, we have a current affairs debate on Poland because we are deeply worried about recent developments... 23/01/2023 | 17:07:55 Thank you, colleagues and thanks for this debate, for not forgetting about what happened because that, and our colleagues reminded us of it, since Ukraine, we may tend to forget the thing that happened before. And we should not fall into that trap. If justice is not being done and seen to be done with the most heinous of crimes, genocide, then we lose credibility as an international community in other very serious crimes, but less serious than genocide. So I fully understand my British... 23/01/2023 | 16:16:05 Thank you, Madam Chair. After the horrors of the Second World War we founded this Council of Europe. We had two objectives: no more war and no large-scale war and no genocide. We had a number of smaller wars and now we have a large-scale war. And today we are discussing the issue of a genocide committed by thousands of Europeans in Syria and Iraq. That is a failure in what we sought to do. In 2017 we decided that Daesh had committed genocide and other serious crimes on their international law... 15/03/2022 | 10:33:13 Thank you. When this organisation was founded, in 1949, in the original meeting Churchill held a speech and started: "Throughout our long history we have triumphed over the perils of religious wars, of dynastic wars. After 30 years of conflict I'm confident that we have now reached the end of nationalist wars. After all our victories and all our suffering, are we now to founder in ultimate chaos, in ideological wars triggered by barbarous lawless oligarchies?" These words are more true today... 27/09/2021 | 16:52:22 Okay sorry colleagues, thank you very much. Thank you very much to Mr Paul GAVAN for an excellent report which is deeply and deeply depressing. The whole idea of having a Council of Europe was that we would at least be able to prevent a conflict in which member states are involved. It seems that it has become normality that we accept this kind of conflict. We have had the Russian invasion of Georgia. We have had the invasion of Ukraine and now we have had the Azerbaijani attack on Nagorno...