12/10/2023 | 17:58:21 During the January session, I was the first speaker in the current affairs debate on the Lachin corridor. The blockade was only a few weeks old, yet things were already clear. At the time, the Azeri delegation spoke of "fake news", the few acknowledged difficulties being attributed to environmental activists protesting pollution problems in Nagorno-Karabakh. In short: move along, there was nothing to see. The Armenians' regular allegations of difficulties in supplying food, heating oil and... 20/06/2023 | 16:18:36 Thank you, Madam President. Ladies and Gentlemen, dear colleagues, Distinguished guests from Belarus, Allow me to begin my remarks with an edifying personal story: in November 2019, I took part in a mission to observe the parliamentary elections in Belarus and, like my colleagues, I was astonished by the quite extraordinary way in which the ballot boxes filled up without any visible demonstration by the voters. Let me explain: voters were able to cast their ballots in advance, I believe four... 27/01/2023 | 10:29:10 Thank you, Madam Vice President. Dear Colleagues, I had a certain feeling of uneasiness when reading this report, a report that is otherwise a solid and well-constructed work. Well done, Damien COTTIER. No, this deeper feeling is in fact the questioning of the finality, the meaning of all this. Let's do a little history. Over the centuries, there has been a general tendency for the art of war to evolve. We can imagine the first combatants, with just a weapon, who faced each other. Then came... 26/01/2023 | 19:06:39 Thank you, Mister President. The Lachin corridor is a strip of territory about 5 km wide that connects 65 km of the Armenian border with the territory called Nagorno-Karabakh or Artsakh by Armenia and Karabakh by Azerbaijan. This is a strategic location that was the subject of special arrangements during the negotiations that followed the fighting in 2020. The tripartite agreement of 9 November 2020 set out in its Article 6 the obligation of Azerbaijan, which had control of this place, to... 26/01/2023 | 18:57:13 Thank you, Mister Vice-President. I would like to thank all the speakers in this debate. I would just like to remind you of a few things and make some answers. Our former colleague from France, Ms Josette DURRIEU, had in fact spoken of the Republic of Moldova as a country between two worlds, a country that she described in her book as struck by great instability, by recurrent political changes and always this difficulty in knowing whether it was going to turn to the West or rather to Russia... 26/01/2023 | 18:14:03 Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Dear colleagues, First of all, I would like to apologize for the absence of Ms. Inese LĪBIŅA-EGNERE from Latvia, co-reporter, who has just been appointed Minister of Justice in her country and therefore had to leave our Assembly. I would like to thank her for the excellent work she has done during the last two years under the mandate given to us. This report reflects developments in Moldova since the last report debated by the Parliamentary Assembly in October... 23/01/2023 | 16:48:20 Thank you, Madam President. In our world, which is going a little crazy, we forget quickly, and the horrors that follow one another soon make us forget, overshadow the previous horrors. Today, the war in Ukraine with the heinous crimes perpetrated by the Russian forces and the Wagner militia have replaced in our minds the appalling images that were our daily life in the days of the omnipotence of Daesh and the Islamic State less than a decade ago. Today, many former Daesh fighters and their... 14/10/2022 | 11:52:27 Thank you, Madam President. Ladies and Gentlemen, colleagues, We have come a long way in two and a half years. I will allow myself a medical comment - I hope a reassuring one - on this whole story. At the beginning, there was a generalized panic with the images from Italy that arrived in our different countries and that scared us greatly. The authorities were taken by surprise: there was clearly no sufficient preparation, no masks, no sufficient hydroalcoholic solutions. Above all, we... 12/10/2022 | 20:02:08 I was only trying to be gallant, Madam President. There you have it, dear colleagues, I have many things to say and I thank you all for your contribution to this debate. It is a very complicated subject, we can feel it, with a lot of emotion, with vehement criticisms that are justified from your point of view. But my problem is that I have the impression, when I speak with my colleague, with the commission, with the Secretariat about this problem, that I am really in line with the values of... 12/10/2022 | 18:32:19 Thank you, Mr. Vice President. If you don't mind, I'm going to speak sitting down because I gave my sheets to the translators and then it didn't come back. Mr Vice President, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear colleagues, In these successive reports, especially the last one entitled "Pushed Beyond the Limits", it is urgent to put an end to refoulements at Europe's borders. The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. Dunja Mijatović, is concerned about the recurrent problem of push-backs...