03/10/2024 | 10:44:24 Mister President, I am most grateful to our rapporteur Mr Knut ABRAHAM for having prepared such a clearly written and factual report on one of the worst crimes on our continent committed in the last century, namely the deliberate starving to death of an estimated 10 million Ukrainians in the early 1930s. For two years in a row, the harvest in Ukraine was confiscated by Stalin’s henchmen, and then either destroyed or taken to other parts of the Soviet Union. Not even the seeds foreseen for the... 02/10/2024 | 18:54:51 Thank you very much. And the debate is closed. The Committee on the Honouring of Obligations and Commitments by Member States of the Council of Europe (Monitoring Committee) has presented a draft resolution [Doc. 16039] to which two amendments have been tabled. I remind you that speeches on amendments are limited to 30 seconds. Any amendment which has been unanimously approved by the Committee seized for report shall not be put to the vote in plenary and shall be declared as definitively... 02/10/2024 | 18:03:28 Thank you very much. The debate is closed. The Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons has presented a draft resolution and a draft recommendation [Doc. 16050], to which no amendments have been tabled. We will now proceed to vote on the draft resolution contained in Doc. 16050. A simple majority is required. The vote is open. And the vote is closed. I call for the result to be displayed. And the draft resolution in Document 16050 is adopted unanimously. Congratulations. We... 01/10/2024 | 20:37:42 (Undelivered speech, Rules of Procedure Art. 31.2) Mr President, The situation in Iran is, to put it mildly, really bad. Individual freedoms have suffered badly, not least for women. Desperate popular protests are being crushed with extreme violence by the ruthless servants of the illegitimate Islamic dictatorship. The country’s theocratic leadership uses the Islamic Revolutionary Guard to attack the broader population when they protest against runaway inflation and the regime’s apparent... 01/10/2024 | 20:37:29 (Undelivered speech, Rules of Procedure Art. 31.2) Mr President, At its session last January, the Assembly voted to deprive the Azerbaijani delegation of its voting rights for the year 2024. Seventy-six Assembly members - a clear majority - voted in favor of this proposal. Ironically, me and the other seventy-five members, were declared persona non grata in Azerbaijan. It must be hard to find a better way for the Azeri regime to show us that our decision was right. The reason for such... 27/06/2024 | 11:45:11 Thank you, Madam President. Our rapporteur [inaudible..] record time written a very good report on a highly important and complicated subject, namely what needs to be done following the displacement of over 10 million Ukrainians from their homes, whether abroad, in Europe or beyond, or in Ukraine itself. This comes following Russia's unprovoked and utterly cruel and brutal invasion of the country. Not since the years following the Second World War has Europe experienced something on this... 27/06/2024 | 11:00:32 Dear Mister President, I was among those many who, in the spring, pushed for the new Georgian legislation on so-called "foreign influence" to be urgently debated in our midst. And here we are doing just that, and I commend the Assembly on its speed of reaction. As the title of our debate implies, the "foreign influence" legislation represents a real threat to Georgian democracy and in fact it represents a threat to European democracy. In brief, it focuses on any non-governmental organisations... 26/06/2024 | 12:10:14 Thank you, Mister President. First of all, I wish to thank our rapporteur Ms Yelyzaveta YASKO for her truly excellent and much needed report on sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. It is indeed a very complete summary of what’s been done so far by the international community and illustrates the wide range of forms that sanctions against Russia have in fact taken. As importantly the report shows what remains to be done in terms of closing remaining gaps and loopholes... 25/06/2024 | 17:39:10 Thank you, Mister President. When I read the wide-ranging report by our esteemed rapporteur, Ms Petra BAYR, on the protection of women human rights defenders, my thoughts wondered on two essential figures of our present time, Ms Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya of Belarus and Ms Yulia Navalnaya of Russia. Of course, how can I not mention such historical figures as the young black woman Rosa Parks who in the year 1955 refused to give up her whites-only seat in an Alabama bus, and who thereby set in... 25/06/2024 | 12:04:54 So, if no one objects I will consider the Amendments to be approved. Is there an objection? If there is, we will need to verify that the objection has the required support of 10 people. Please could those who object raise your hand. That seems not to be the case. So Amendments 1 to 10 to the draft Resolution are therefore approved and will not be called. We'll now proceed to vote on the draft Resolution contained in Document 15871 as amended. A simple majority is required. The vote is now...