24/01/2024 | 14:42:24 Thank you. We will now hear an address by Mr Daniel RISCH, Prime Minister of Liechtenstein. After his address, the Prime Minister will take questions from the floor. Dear colleagues, On our agenda this afternoon I have told you that we have the honour and pleasure of welcoming the Prime Minister of Liechtenstein, Mr Daniel RISCH. After his intervention, Mr RISCH has kindly accepted to reply to questions from the members. Mister Prime Minister, we are particularly happy to have you among us... 24/01/2024 | 14:40:05 Dear colleagues, good afternoon. The sitting is open. This afternoon the Agenda calls for the second round of the election of a Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights and a judge to the European Court of Human Rights in respect of Bulgaria. In the second round a relative majority applies. In the event of a tie, there will be a third round of voting and, if necessary, further rounds until a decision is reached. The list of candidates and biographical notices for the election of the... 23/01/2024 | 20:06:58 Dear colleagues, I have the honour to announce the results of the election of the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. The total number of members voting was 254. The number of spoiled or blank ballot papers is 4. The number of valid votes is 250. Absolute majority of the votes cast, 126 votes. The votes were cast as follows: Ms Meglena Kuneva from Bulgaria – 78 votes. Mr Manfred Nowak from Austria – 75 votes. Mr Michael O'Flaherty from Ireland – 97 votes. No candidate having... 23/01/2024 | 15:40:00 Dear Mister President, thank you so much for being with us today. I want to thank you most warmly for your address and for the answers you have already given to the questions. Dear colleagues, I remind you that voting is open for the election of: - the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights; and - 3 judges to the European Court of Human Rights in respect of Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Luxembourg. The votes will close at 6:00 p.m. I invite those of you who have not yet voted to do so... 23/01/2024 | 14:37:27 Dear colleagues, Let's start our session. On January 2024, the opening of the first part-session of the Parliamentary Assembly the still unratified credentials of the German parliamentary delegation were challenged on procedural grounds in accordance with Rule 7.1b of the Assembly's Rule of Procedure, namely on the grounds that the composition of the delegation did not allow fair representation of the political parties or groups of the German Bundestag. The Committee on Rules of Procedure... 22/01/2024 | 16:38:27 Thank you so much, dear Tiny, for your kind words. And of course the deep appreciation you have had today from this Assembly makes my job much more difficult. I'll try to fulfil the criteria that you have already implemented. Thank you so much, once again. Dear colleagues, The Bureau has proposed references and transmissions to committees, and the modification of a reference, for ratification by the Assembly. They are set out in Doc. 15885 and Addendum 1. Is there any objection to the... 22/01/2024 | 15:37:24 Dear colleagues, Please be seated. We will start with the proposed changes in the composition of Committees which have been published in Doc. 202401 Addendum 2. Are there any objections to these changes? So, since there are no objections, they are adopted. And the first item on the agenda is the continuation of the debate on the progress report of the Bureau and the Standing Committee presented earlier by Mr Tiny KOX. This will be combined with a consideration of the report of the ad-hoc... 22/01/2024 | 12:43:36 It was like reconciliation between Sparta and Athens 2,500 years later. I hope we will manage to solve the issues that I already mentioned earlier. Dear colleagues, The next item on the Agenda is the election of Vice-Presidents of the Assembly. 18 nominations for Vice-Presidents are listed in Doc. AS/Inf (2024) 01. If there is no request for a vote, they will be declared elected. Since there has been no request for a vote, I declare these candidates elected as Vice-President of the... 22/01/2024 | 12:34:08 I like to imagine that among the assembled crowd listening to Winston Churchill in Place Kleber there was perhaps a woman pregnant with twins – a girl and a boy. This woman would have been watching the speech and happily waving the flag of reconciliation in hope. Her children, the boy and the girl, would have been born into a world of poverty and hardship, but they would have grown up seeing that inequalities between the genders were slowly being reduced. They worked hard to live and build... 22/01/2024 | 12:29:36 Dear colleagues, Dear friends, Chers collègues, Chers amis, Somewhere amongst us in this Plenary is my good friend Lord Leslie GRIFFITHS, from the United Kingdom, who has many decades of life experience behind him. I'm sure that he will be surprised by my referring to him now, but allow me to complete my sentence by saying that on these same benches is our younger colleague Mr Max LUCKS from Germany. The rest of us stand somewhere between Leslie and Max. We have each followed our own path and...