22/04/2021 | 11:59:20 Madam President. I'm honoured to take the forum on behalf of European Conservatives and Democratic Alliance political group regarding the functioning of democratic institutions in Turkey. I salute the untiring wok and expertise on this subject by our two rapporteurs from the Monitoring Committee: my fellow countryman Mr Thomas HAMMARBERG and my fellow political group colleague Mr John HOWELL. The fact that both these rapporteurs are in such agreement as to the shortcomings in today's Turkish... 21/04/2021 | 13:14:10 (Undelivered speech, Rules of Procedure Art. 31.2) Mr President, Our Assembly owes major thanks to our two Rapporteurs for their excellent reports in our debate today on the situation in Belarus. Reading these two reports is a bit like travelling back in time, back to a society seemingly stuck in a ‘time warp’ - to a long-gone European era where innocent demonstrators would be arrested, beaten, sometimes tortured, and then vanish without a trace. We see indespicable and inhumane acts... 20/04/2021 | 18:01:21 (Undelivered speech, Rules of Procedure Art. 31.2) Madam President, When we discussed yesterday whether to include the subject of Armenian prisoners of war in our agenda this week, one of our esteemed Azerbaijani colleagues said that he was against, since he thought that a debate would not have any tangible results. As it turned out, however, a solid majority among us voted in favour of a debate. And I think we did this for a number of good reasons. The first reason is that we have all been... 28/01/2021 | 13:31:00 (Undelivered speech, Rules of Procedure Art. 31.2) Mr President, When people in the United States, and the world, think of the events of January 6th this year, they think of the outrageous and tragic storming of the Capitol building in Washington DC. A clear attack on the heart of American democracy. But many also think of what happened in the attack’s aftermath. I refer to the closure of social media platforms by Big Tech companies - among them Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - against people... 30/01/2020 | 10:52:55 Mr President, We're now debating a very important issue and the path that our member states choose to take in this matter will change our societies. The basic plea made in the report as to, as soon as possible and without hesitation, take care of especially children of Islamic State terrorists and to move them out of squalid camps in Syria and Iraq to European countries. However, international conventions prohibit children from being separated from their parents. At the same time, if a parent... 25/06/2019 | 16:36:12 Madam President, It is of extreme importance for the future of our societies that the Istanbul Convention on violence against women is successfully implemented across Europe. For if we cannot stop the present dramatic rise in the physical, mental and social abuse of so many women, then our western civilisation will not endure for long, based as it is on human rights and equality - including between the sexes. My own country, Sweden, got its first laws protecting women over 700 years ago, in... 22/01/2019 | 19:19:21 I am heartened by the fact that our Assembly is addressing one of the most burning issues of our time – namely, whether the growing practice of Sharia in Europe is compatible with the cornerstone of European and Western civilisation, the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. I am impressed by how fairly the rapporteur, Mr Gutiérrez, and our Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights scrutinised the European Convention on Human Rights and the Cairo... 22/01/2019 | 17:39:18 For a long time, the international community stood helpless when it was confronted with flagrant cases of human rights violations inflicted on so-called whistleblowers, the people whose only action had been to report crimes they had witnessed to the authorities. Meanwhile, the people who were guilty of those crimes or stood to benefit from them went unpunished, while the whistleblowers were to be punished. The Sergei Magnitsky case of 2009 and its follow-up, admirably dealt with in the report...