28/09/2021 | 16:38:25 Thank you so much, Mr President. My question to Mr Minister is a simple one actually which we have already discussed at this plenary so many times. We have been observing that many members of this very Council are defying court decisions. Given that the Committee of Ministers is the body responsible for the execution of court decisions, I would like to ask: what do they specifically plan to do, given that there is a growing tendency in many Member States in simply not implementing binding... 24/06/2021 | 17:05:34 Thank you. Thank you, Mr Chair, I also would like to congratulate Mr Momodou Malcolm JALLOW for this short, but excellent report, both in terms of content and style. Let me first say a couple of things about the content. I found this report to be very radical. I know oftentimes people do not like the word "radical" but I use this in a very specific sense. By radical, I mean it captures the very root causes of the problem and it addresses those very roots with specific proposals. What do I... 22/04/2021 | 12:02:21 Dear Chair, Dear Colleagues, Six months ago, we had another urgent affairs debate on Turkey. Let me start by reading a few sentences from that resolution: “In the past months there were new crackdowns on political opposition and civil dissent… Investigations and prosecutions targeted members of parliament, … opposition political parties and lawyers. Continued undue pressure exerted on journalists... and civil society activists… Such crackdowns also have a regrettable chilling effect on women... 20/11/2020 | 17:15:15 Thank you, Mr President. I would like to first congratulate Mr Koloman BRENNER for this very timely and much needed and wonderful report and resolution. I myself was an academic before I joined formal politics so that's why I very carefully read every single sentence a couple of times. It seems that the report does have two main arguments. On the one hand it is the argument about the commercialization of academic institutions, a process whereby knowledge becomes a commodity. By commodity I... 03/10/2019 | 15:47:26 Thank you, Madam Chair. This summer we have seen protests in Russia against the government's crackdown on the opposition, in the run-up to the Moscow city council elections. Detentions, police violence, disqualification or arrest of opposition candidates have greatly undermined the legitimacy of these elections. Russian authorities have violated the freedom of speech, the right to assembly and peaceful protest, and the right to have a fair and free election: the fundamentals of any democratic... 28/06/2019 | 10:17:51 I would also like to thank Madam Rapporteur for this quality work. It nicely summarises some of the main issues that relate to the Syrian conflict, which is now in the eighth year and cost dearly to the peoples of Syria. Unfortunately, as a person from Turkey who is close to Syria and actually Turkey is at war in Syria, I'm not very optimistic about a possible resolution of the conflict in the near future, for the clear fact that the fate of Syrian people unfortunately is not in their hands... 25/06/2019 | 11:48:08 Thank you, Madam Chair. I also would like to thank Mr Rapporteur for the effort and time he put into the report. The report makes repeated references to the reason why the Council of Europe is having an unprecedented financial crisis as an institution: that a member state named Russia didn't fulfill some financial obligations and refused to make its annual contributions over the last three years and so we are having a huge crisis now. On the surface, this seems to be the reason but I think... 24/01/2019 | 16:25:33 I am one of the HDP deputies whom my colleagues accuse of being a terrorist. I will not go into polemics – we are having a serious debate – but I only wish that we had a mature democracy in Turkey so we could have negotiated our differences and resolved our questions at home, not carried them here. Of course, it is useless to defend myself and say that I am not a terrorist. It is really disrespectful to call colleagues that. I will briefly say something about the situation of Leyla Güven, who... 23/01/2019 | 10:38:46 Rather than speak about the issue in terms of some abstract and general categories, let me engage the two reports by focusing on my own country of Turkey, where, unfortunately, we have experienced almost every single problem outlined in the two reports regarding media freedom. After the abortive coup in July 2016, about 200 media outlets were not only banned under emergency rule, but their properties were unlawfully confiscated. Many were Kurdish or opposition media. Over 3 000 journalists...