20/06/2023 | 17:01:07 Thank you, Madam Chairman. Dear colleagues, On 9 August 2020, Belarus held presidential elections marred by numerous irregularities. The government of Mr Aleksandr Lukashenko waged a systematic campaign of repression before the vote and during the election itself. Following the vote, the results of which were strongly disputed, anti-government demonstrations were violently repressed. Observers reported numerous human rights violations in connection with the elections, which were strongly... 27/04/2023 | 17:02:19 Dear colleagues, As you may know, on March 17, the judges of the International Criminal Court took the extraordinary decision to issue arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his Commissioner for Children's Rights. They are accused of, and I quote, "the war crime of illegal deportation of population and the war crime of illegal transfer of population from certain occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation", and we are talking here mainly about... 26/04/2023 | 19:41:38 Thank you, Madam President. Dear colleagues, The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights pointed out last month that the number of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights monitored by the Committee of Ministers has risen from 5 231 at the end of 2019 to 6 256 on 1 March 2023. This is certainly a worrying trend, but as the report by the rapporteur, Mr Constantinos EFSTATHIOU, makes very clear, by 31 December 2021, six countries, and... 13/10/2022 | 17:12:13 Thank you, Mister President. Dear Colleagues, I confess that I was among those who were surprised to see the United Kingdom vote by a small margin in favor of Brexit. The British apparently wanted their independence back. But Quebec would have been offered the same arrangement that England enjoyed within the European Union, which the sovereignist in me would have celebrated. The challenges facing England in the wake of Brexit seem to outweigh the benefits that were expected to flow from it... 22/06/2022 | 17:03:44 Ladies and gentlemen, rapporteurs, dear colleagues, We are holding this debate today, the day after World Refugee Day. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has, as the report presented by the rapporteur Mr Pierre-Alain FRIDEZ reminds us, caused "the largest movement of populations since the Second World War". Although I readily acknowledge that the United Nations Refugee Agency has somewhat reduced its overall assessment of the number of Ukrainian refugees, "to better reflect recent refugee... 21/06/2022 | 19:13:25 Thank you, Mr Chairman. Hello again, I should say, good evening, colleagues, Thank you very much, rapporteurs. I would like to focus on the second topic. Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to address you several times on the subject of Alexei Navalny, who is undoubtedly the best-known political prisoner in Russia. Mr Navalny clearly meets the definition of a political prisoner adopted by this House in 2012, as his detention "was imposed for purely political reasons". Yet... 21/06/2022 | 11:09:47 Thank you, Mr President. Thank you to the rapporteur. Dear colleagues, It is a great honour for me to finally have the opportunity to address you in person. At various times in our recent history, many have prematurely proclaimed the victory of liberal democracy. This was the case with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some even suggesting that this heralded the "end of history". The entry of Communist China into the market economy and the rise of the internet on its territory suggested... 28/04/2022 | 12:19:50 Dear colleagues, Thank you Mr Rapporteur, On 3 March of this year, at the very beginning of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, the President of this Assembly, Mr Tiny KOX, demanded that the Russian Federation comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols. In his statement, he highlighted the fact that these Conventions and their Additional Protocols, and I quote, "provide for the protection of the... 27/04/2022 | 20:05:38 Good morning Madam President, Good morning dear colleagues, I would like to thank the rapporteur Mr Oleksandr MEREZHKO for his report on ways to combat and prevent the excessive and unjustified use of force by law enforcement officials. This is a subject that particularly caught my attention when I was a member of the Quebec National Assembly, notably when I was Minister of Public Security of Quebec between 2012 and 2014. In the early 2010s, we were confronted in Quebec with a major social... 27/04/2022 | 11:26:48 Good morning Madam President, Good morning, colleagues, Good morning, Mr Rapporteur, According to a cynical quote often attributed – perhaps wrongly – to Joseph Stalin, "the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic". While the loss of life in Ukraine is thankfully still far from the stratospheric levels of such a so-called statistic, the horrors we are witnessing should not be trivialised. Civilians executed in cold blood in Bucha, their arms tied behind...