09/10/2023 | 17:46:53 (Undelivered speech, Rules of Procedure Art. 31.2) Whilst she report says that the elections were well run I am still worried that it is too easy to distort results when the electorate is so small. The official electorate is 542,000 but there is another 100,000 in the “diaspora” who may largely be Serbian with dubious “dual citizenship.” There are big flaws in Montenegrin election law but it is more incompetence rather than deliberate rigging of the whole system as I saw in Turkey. Apart from... 09/10/2023 | 16:32:41 The immediate trigger for the recent escalation, is that the Kosovo government, led by Prime Minister Albin Kurti, took advantage of a crisis in neighbouring Serbia to try to cement control in the north leading to some serious clashes. These clashes are the latest flare-up in a long-running dispute that was a major driver of conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s. Fighting ended at the close of that decade, with NATO intervention and the separation of Kosovo (with its ethnic Albanian majority... 26/01/2023 | 12:58:11 (Undelivered speech, Rules of Procedure Art. 31.2) We need a new Nuremberg Tribunal. History is repeating itself in the evils perpetrated by Russia in the Ukraine just as Russia and others were the victims of evil perpetrated by the National Socialists of Germany 75 years ago. So let us repeat that history in the way we try the new perpetrators of evil. The Nuremberg trials did not come about by international consensus. No. Just four countries unilaterally declared that we would hold an... 25/01/2023 | 13:06:50 (Undelivered speech, Rules of Procedure Art. 31.2) I commend the leader of the UK Delegation for this inspired report which deals with a very serious problem which we all ignore. Of course our top concern must be the loss of life. And we have to recognise the reality, as we are seeing in the Ukraine day after day, that armies, soldiers and leaders can be brutal and evil. As Putin and his genocidal generals, bomb Ukrainian schools, hospitals, and civilian buildings as part of a tactic to so... 15/03/2022 | 15:45:59 Thank you, Mr President. This Council should hang its head in shame, but now it has a chance to redeem itself. We should be ashamed of when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 the whole western world did nothing. This organisation did nothing. That was the first big green light to Putin to do whatever he liked. So Putin then took over the Crimea and two provinces in Eastern Ukraine and we did nothing. When Russia left Council of Europe, what did we do? We went to them with our begging bowl and... 25/01/2022 | 10:39:24 Good morning, Madam president. In my years serving in this honourable Assembly, I can say the report by Mr Fourat BEN CHIKHA is unique. Unique because I have never before seen such a biased, distorted, utterly wrong work of fiction than his comments about the United Kingdom. If it goes unamended, then we'll bring this Assembly into disrepute. The United Kingdom may not have been amongst the first to decriminalise homosexual acts and permit gay marriage, but we were decades ahead of some other... 21/04/2021 | 12:31:19 Mr President, First of all I am grateful to everyone who has spoken in this excellent debate and I particularly welcome the comments, the unanimous comments from members on my report. I wish to thank Ms Ingjerd SCHOU from Norway, Mr Tiny KOX, Lord George FOULKES, Mr Koloman BRENNER from Hungary, Mr Oleksii GONCHARENKO, Lord Leslie GRIFFITHS from the United Kingdom and Ms Laima Liucija ANDRIKIENĖ from Lithuania, Mr Pierre-Alain FRIDEZ from Switzerland, Ms Nicole TRISSE from France, Mr John... 21/04/2021 | 11:11:18 Dear colleagues, Elections in Belarus have never met international standards of freedom and fairness. That is a sad fact which we are familiar with in the Assembly, as we have observed several elections in Belarus, the last one being the parliamentary elections in November 2019, when I had the privilege to chair the Assembly’s election observation mission. Therefore, it came as no surprise when last August, in the aftermath of yet another election which was neither free nor fair, the citizens... 27/01/2020 | 12:45:13 May I give congratulations on your splendid election as our President and thank you for the good wishes that wheelchair people may one day get onto the floor of the Plenary. First of all, I want to thank the 18 members of the Assembly representing all political groups of the Assembly and 16 Council of Europe member states which did such an excellent job of observation in Belarus. The delegation was accompanied by legal experts from the Council of Europe Venice Commission, who gave us some... 10/04/2019 | 10:54:40 Just three days ago it was reported in the British press that the left-wing Labour MP Jess Phillips had received five death threats, which the police were investigating. A member sitting in this Chamber today has also received death threats. What vile, evil people threaten to kill a British Labour MP? Were they neo-fascists or from the far right or the National Front? No. The threats to kill came from paid-up members of the British Labour party, who thought she was Jewish, which she is not...