29/01/2020 | 16:33:32 Distinguished President, Ladies and gentlemen, It is not easy if you sit there to reach this area here, but I'm here. The Council of Europe faces a lot of challenges, but it's not the Council of Europe alone. There are a lot of international organisations who have a lot of problems due to what we call a crisis of multilateralism. I think what we should always know is that it's not a crisis of the institutions. It's a crisis of some countries who would like to be members of an institution but... 28/01/2020 | 10:30:57 Thank you very much, Mister President. Dear colleagues, first, it's interesting to recognise we now speak in the name of the very honorable and traditional group of European Conservatives to defend the government of Poland. I would like to thank the rapporteurs for this important report, which we've had to wait a very long time for. It's not you but there were others who failed to present a report in time to act. We always have a discussion about the question of who's more responsible for... 03/10/2019 | 12:10:28 Madam President, Secretary-General, Dear judges, Human rights defenders, Staff of this great organisation, Dear Colleagues. "It happened, therefore it can happen again." This is a quote from Primo Levi, an Italian writer and survivor of the Holocaust. "It happened, therefore it can happen again." That was the motivation for a project of school pupils in my constituency, Waltrop. The title of the project was "Alertness Project." When I sat there and was introduced to the project, I realised... 03/10/2019 | 10:29:34 Madame President, Dear Colleagues, Today is an urgent debate and indeed an urgent debate not about migration. You can talk about it many times, but today it is not about migration. Incidentally, there has always been migration, as we can see in many reports we make on minority rights, on language, on labor migration. Today, it is simply the question and the debate over how we deal with people who drown in the Mediterranean, who drown miserably. Whether we try to reach out to these people and... 02/10/2019 | 12:12:20 Madame President, Ms Secretary General, Also from my group once again the warmest congratulations on your choice in this really –I do not know– fateful seventieth year. We are really in a phase where we can re-develop and re-deploy this organization. That is why, I think, it is a good opportunity to do that together. This starts now, first of all with this new procedure, which we have agreed upon together and where we now have to come to a credible mechanism in a reasonable period of time... 01/10/2019 | 13:10:33 Thank you, President. I would like to express my sincere thanks for the French Presidency of the Council of Europe. You have led this Council of Europe into a new era. Russia is back, but we have agreed that we will create a new mechanism to deal with the countries that do not follow the rules here. I can only encourage you to continue on this path consistently. I'd like to follow on to what Ms BAKOYANNIS has said. I think it is a disgrace that we in Europe are allowing people in the... 27/06/2019 | 16:58:46 Thank you very much Madam President. So on one thing although we have some things in common, on one thing we totally disagree. This is the question if what we do here in the Council of Europe is a punishment or it's a chance for countries to be better. So it's really not a punishment. If we really think it's a punishment to have a kind of monitoring or post-monitoring or whatever, then I don't know what we do as an organisation. Then we don't need to do our jobs. I just ask for the foreseen... 27/06/2019 | 16:16:39 I would like to thank you very much for your help in preparing this report. First of all to the office of the committee and Agnieszka Nachilo, but also to the good cooperation with the Bulgarian delegation; even if we may not agree on every point in the end. But I think it was a very good cooperation, over a very long time. Many thanks, for the good support and for the good organization also according to our visitors and the exchange. It is not always easy to find dates, because there was... 26/06/2019 | 15:49:45 Madam President Ladies and gentlemen, We started a path together on Monday and today it is up to us, I believe, to be consistent and to go a little further along this path. We've talked about how it's not about Russia alone. Of course it's about Russia. Now this report is about Russia, but it is all about looking at how this organisation is armed; how it is prepared for the challenge of the future. It has become clear that if we have two bodies, the Committee of Ministers and the... 24/06/2019 | 16:24:25 Thank you very much, Madam President, I would like to thank all those who have really played a very constructive part in this debate. I would, of course, particularly like to thank Petra De SUTTER, who is the next member of the European Parliament, and who, so to speak, fled a little from these tasks, which she did, however, manage excellently, and helped us on this issue. Thank you Petra De Sutter, thank you very much for that. I would like to thank the Committee of Ministers, because we...