08/04/2019 | 15:23:51 Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr Minister, my question concerns the procedure for the selection of the next Secretary General of the Council of Europe. As you well know, the mandate of the Committee of Ministers is to assess whether candidates correspond to the official criteria for this high office and those official criteria are well known. There are views that the Committee of Ministers overstepped its mandate and infringed on the competences of the Assembly by blocking Andrius Kubilius, the... 24/01/2019 | 17:06:05 On behalf of the Group of the European People’s Party, I will make a couple of points about the Assembly’s progress report on the monitoring procedure. I am happy that the attendance for this debate is satisfactory. On previous occasions, the progress reports on the monitoring procedure have received less attention than they deserved. The monitoring procedure is perhaps this Assembly’s most important instrument in scrutinising democracy and the democratic development of Member States. The... 24/01/2019 | 11:21:23 I start by responding to Lord Richard BALFE. Dear colleague, nobody is asking for military action against the Russian Federation. We are talking about ensuring that steps are not taken that would invite further trouble or that would invite the Russian Federation to carry out more aggression and kill more people in Council of Europe member States’ territories. It is my strong belief that allowing Russian members of the Assembly – it is another question whether they represent a democratically... 22/01/2019 | 16:56:59 As you very well know, symbols matter in politics. The name of Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered to cover up the theft of $230 million of Russian taxpayers’ money, has become a global symbol of how to fight human rights abuses. In fact, Magnitsky legislation, which has now been passed in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the three Baltic States, is emerging as a powerful global tool in the fight against human rights abusers, which has already resulted in consequences for some... 21/01/2019 | 18:19:25 In this free debate, I would like to take a couple of minutes to draw your attention to a matter of paramount importance for the functioning of any democratic society and for fragile democracies in particular: the independence of the judiciary. It is particularly important for democracies in transition that have emerged from a totalitarian past. Without an independent judiciary, all democracy-building efforts are doomed to fail. In the Soviet period, there was no independent judiciary in... 21/01/2019 | 17:28:39 Anyone who wants to reach an informed opinion about whether the Georgian elections were free and fair must read the election observation report by the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, to which our Assembly mission is a signatory. It is a more authoritative and unbiased source than I or my colleague from the ruling party. Many of you remember the Georgia of the 1990s – a failed state; civil war; corruption; kidnappings. Fast-forward to 2003 – the Rose Revolution...