31/01/2020 | 11:13:49 Thank you, Mr. President, Ladies and gentlemen, I, too, would like to thank our colleague Mr Frithjof SCHMIDT for the quality of his report on pirated democracy and the means to respond. Last November, in the framework of the French Chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, the French delegation to PACE had itself already organised a colloquium on human rights and democracy in the digital age. While misinformation or alternative facts are not new. The accelerated... 30/01/2020 | 17:05:30 Mr Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, I, too, wish to thank our fellow rapporteurs for their important work, which enables us to address two themes that are strongly interlinked: on the one hand, concerted action against trafficking in human beings and smuggling of migrants; on the other hand, the disappearance of refugee or migrant children in Europe. The reports remind us that the Council of Europe, and in particular our Assembly, has long been interested in these issues. Article 4 of the... 04/10/2019 | 11:16:31 Madam President, My dear colleagues, Displacement of persons has always been part of the history of our continent. In the European Union, the free movement of workers is a right recognised by the European treaties, especially within the Schengen area. The idea is that labour is considered a necessary resource for the production of goods and services and to promote an efficient allocation of it within the European area. But EU countries also welcome people from other European states such as... 04/10/2019 | 10:26:36 Mister President, Dear colleagues, I, too, would like to commend the quality of the work done by our colleague Mr Raphaël COMTE who highlights a real problem, that of the conservation of the Jewish cultural heritage, scattered in the European countries. In fact, Mr Rapporteur, we should even talk about religious (cult) and cultural heritage, the two adjectives unwilling –and you can be sure– to mean the same thing. But anyway, this question concerns us all. This heritage is an integral part... 28/06/2019 | 10:38:08 Thank you, Mr. President, My dear colleagues, First of all, I would like to thank our excellent rapporteur Ms BAKOYANNIS for the relevance of her work. Eight years ago, tens of thousands of Syrians took to the streets to demand the right to express themselves freely, to demand reforms and to demand justice. The brutal response of Bashar al-Assad's regime and its role in the ensuing conflict triggered the most serious humanitarian crisis since World War II. More than 400,000 men, women and... 22/01/2019 | 18:57:09 I thank our colleagues for their thoroughly documented report and their opinions on the complex and sensitive issue of relations between human rights and Islam, because that is what is at stake. Our rapporteur rightly highlighted the incompatibility of the European Convention on Human Rights with a good number of the provisions in the Cairo Declaration, and called for clarification on the former as a binding source of human rights in Europe. I note that, regrettably, several countries respect...