16/04/2024 | 15:56:34 Thank you very much indeed, Mr President. First of all, I should like to congratulate the rapporteur. Europe is, once again, living through the drama of war. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as the Council of Europe has said repeatedly is an unjust an illegal war, constitutes a violation of the rights, principles and values enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. As such, Putin is not only attacking Ukraine, but all of us who believe in freedom, democracy and a rules-based... 25/01/2024 | 15:59:00 Thank you very much, Secretary General, for your report. Thank you very much, President, as well. The independence of judges is one of the pillars of our rule of law. Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights is very clear on this. Regrettably, we have seen in numerous member states, judges are under pressure, and democratic governments are accusing them of practising lawfare at each time they feel the courts adopt decisions against those government's interests while enforcing... 23/01/2024 | 16:50:40 Thank you, Madam President. The terrorist attacks by Hamas on 7 October against the people of Israel has been one of the most horrendous aggressions against the peace that humanity has suffered in the last two decades. In addition, for the hundreds of victims who were killed today, while we are speaking, there are hundreds of innocents who are still a hostage of Hamas. The terrorists knew what they were doing, they knew the damage they were going to cause to the people of Israel, but they... 12/10/2023 | 15:04:26 Thank you, President. Yes, welcome, Commissioner. Precisely today, the day of Spain's national holiday, the Venice Commission is one of the institutions of the system of the Council of Europe. Its instructions to guarantee the independence of the judiciary are clear. One of them is that a governmental body of judges is elected by a majority by the judges themselves. Many countries refuse to adapt their legislation, and in fact, consider reducing parliamentary majorities to elect them. It... 11/10/2023 | 17:34:28 Thank you very much Madam President, This report addresses one of the most important topics of the day, a topic of great importance. I have read the report with great interest. There are a number of questions addressed here – the tension between national security and individual rights. Of course, we should be defending, protecting all individual rights. The issue here is that this is an exercise that could have been a comparative law exercise, to see how these issues are regulated, in... 11/10/2023 | 15:52:46 Thank you Mister President, Last Saturday 7 October, while the people of Israel were celebrating their holiday, they suffered the worst terrorist attack they have suffered in the last 50 years. Hundreds of children, women, families and young people have been brutally murdered. These sorts of massacres remind of us of events like Srebrenica or Bucha. For this reason, my words in the name of my Group of the European People's Party, will be a firm, total and absolute condemnation of these crimes... 24/04/2023 | 17:14:00 Thank you, Mister President. First of all, we want to congratulate the commissioner and say that our Group of the European People's Party group supports your superb work and supports what you say about Ukraine, about Moldova, and about Armenia that is now threatening a repeat of what happened in the 20th century. In our continent there are numerous bilingual communities, and extremist nationalists use education to undermine the rights of children, to eliminate cultural plurality and try to... 20/06/2022 | 12:15:41 Thank you very much Mr President, From my group, the Group of the European People's Party, the first thing that we have to do of course is support the report of Mr Aleksander POCIEJ and also the various comments that have been made by Ms Petra BAYR with regards to the elections in Serbia. I'd like to focus on three things: on the fourth summit for renovation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I think change is extremely important and indeed several European organisations... 26/04/2022 | 12:33:15 Thank you, Mister President. I want to ask the Commissioner if there were signs of this brutal genocide, of these brutal things that we have seen, and the genocide, and the rape and so on, in the Ukrainian war, if there were signs before in Russia that the alarm system didn't show. This report doesn't show what happened afterwards. The alarm system of the Assembly should be more sensitive to a question that affects one of the biggest contributors of this Assembly, which was Russia. We were... 15/03/2022 | 11:27:56 Madam President. Many generations of Europeans such as my own have lived with war. My father experienced the Spanish Civil War and those of his generation the Second World War. We've all witnessed wars in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Even then, we believed that by denying the existence of evil, it would disappear. We do not live in a law- and rule-based world. The Helsinki Final Act signed by all countries in 1975 did not put an end to the revision of borders. The fall of the Berlin Wall did...