15/03/2022 | 09:56:38 Dear President, dear Mariia, thank you rapporteur. It's not easy for sure to speak after such a speech about the really heartbreaking situations Ukrainians have to face in a situation of human disaster we cannot really describe, but we have to do what we can do here. And the Committee of Ministers was represented there, asked us for an opinion not giving us, let's say, a kind of clear guidance. It's quite open what you ask us, and it's up to us to give a very crystal clear answer. What is our... 27/01/2022 | 16:07:10 Mister President, Dear Holocaust Survivors, Ladies and Gentlemen This morning the Bundestag, as we are here now, the German Bundestag, commemorated the Holocaust, as it does every year by now, in the country that succeeds the country that murdered 6 million Jews. Among others, the President of the Knesset, Mickey Levy, spoke today. "Never again", "never again", those were his words as a legacy to today. He tearfully recited an excerpt from the Kaddish prayer there, commemorating the dead of... 26/01/2022 | 16:05:36 Thank you very much, Mister President, even to mention the full name of our group. As colleagues mentioned already, it's the same procedure we have regularly at the beginning of each year. Maybe in the view of some of us, it's necessary, but for sure it's a different situation now in Europe. Europe is discussing troops, Russian troops around Ukraine. I fully understand it. It's not just that Russia has already already territory from Ukraine. We really stand in solidarity, and we have to be in... 25/01/2022 | 16:51:08 Mister President KOX, Dear Minister, This Parliamentary Assembly have the honour to elect judges for the European Courts of Human Rights, so we feel a special kind of responsibility as well for this court. In the end it's the, let's say, the honour but the obligation as well of the Committee of Ministers to guarantee the fulfilment of the judgments of the court. Maybe this is the most important thing in this world organisation. The question is: we have an example, some examples, but we have... 24/01/2022 | 15:54:03 [...] I just hope, but we said at the same time, we want to get into the debate and we see that there are very positive developments, for example, in Ukraine. It is the issue of the cooperation of the international institutions, which certainly has been pushed accordingly and I think that also you can say, that started before the presidency of Mr Rik DAEMS. But the cooperation with the Committee of Ministers has become much more intensive, certainly disturbed now by the COVID situation in the... 24/06/2021 | 16:34:53 President, thank you. In Germany, during the European football championships, there's been a widely watched film called Black Eagles. It's about German Black football players who play in the Bundesliga. Many of them also play for the national team. This film is without commentary. It shows pictures from the past. If you watch this film and see the pictures, you come to realise what Afrophobia means, what racism against Black people means. This is a particularly severe and perfidious form of... 24/06/2021 | 11:35:38 Mister President, In the name of the Socialist Democrats and Greens, I would like to speak about the situation, and I would like to thank for sure Mr Pierre-Alain FRIDEZ for the introduction. We are in a situation that we speak about 70 years of the Geneva Convention and it's very clear. We are in a situation where we will have this Geneva Convention in the future or not. This we have to make very clear. It's not the something a little bit here or a little bit there, the question is do we... 22/04/2021 | 11:45:23 Thank you very much, Madam President, Ladies and gentlemen, We only have important debates here, of course, but we now have the second debate this morning which, in the end, touches the very foundations of this organisation. We have the topical and urgent debate – and I would like to thank the two rapporteurs for their tireless work and for the fact that they have to submit reports here all the time. What some of my Turkish colleagues, at any rate, regard as unfair is that Turkey is always on... 22/04/2021 | 10:22:54 Mister President, Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to address my colleagues from Russia directly. Whatever we think about the geopolitical situation of the last 30 years – and I can understand some disappointments, also on the Russian side, about the geopolitical developments – you yourself committed, in 1996 with Russia's accession, to upholding human rights, the human rights of 144, 145 Russians. That is, so to speak, the promise that you made to the people of Russia with this signature... 28/01/2021 | 09:21:49 Mr President, Ladies and gentlemen, I will continue in German. I am reminded of the film Groundhog Day. Sort of the same theme over and over again and the same attempt to deal with it. At some point one would have to consider whether this is the right way, if the majorities are the way they are, or whether there are not other ways of dealing with the issue. And I want to stress this again, because it was also the subject of yesterday's debate here: despite all the difficulties, all the upset...