15/04/2008 | Session
In a speech to the Parliamentary Assembly on 15 April, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called upon the Russian Federation to adopt Protocol 14 to the European Convention of Human Rights. After visiting the Human Rights Court earlier in the day – where she noted that 50,000 applications are examined per year – she stressed that that the Court has now "come to a limit" and must be "properly reformed." She thanked members of the Russian Duma for their lobbying to have Protocol 14 adopted in the Russian Federation.
15/04/2008 | Session
“The Council of Europe is the home of democracy – so, as a leader of one of the countries amongst the strongest defenders of democracy and human rights in the world, you are very much at home here,” President Lluís Maria de Puig said today welcoming German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the PACE spring session. “Your own itinerary, Chancellor, is the perfect illustration of this. I would like to pay tribute to your strong personal engagement in defending human rights. Your presence here today is an honour and a powerful signal. It shows the importance that European and world leaders should attach to human rights,” he stressed.
14/04/2008 | Session
Andros Kyprianou (UEL), a PACE member since June 2006, has been elected its new Vice-President with respect to Cyprus. The 20 Vice-Presidents of PACE chair its debates when the President of the Assembly is not available. They can also be called upon by the President to fulfill certain of his representational obligations.
14/04/2008 | Session
Slovak President Ivan Gašparovic, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner are among the leading personalities to address the PACE during its spring session in Strasbourg (14-18 April 2008). The final order of business, adopted today by the Assembly, includes an urgent debate on the functioning of democratic institutions in Armenia and a current affairs debate on the consequences of the declaration of independence by the Kosovo Assembly. Topics to be debated include access to safe and legal abortion in Europe and Muslim communities confronted with extremism. On the fringe of the session, the Political Affairs Committee will hold a public hearing on “The situation in China on the eve of the Olympic Games”.
14/04/2008 | Session
''The voice of the Council of Europe is heard less or not at all. The future of the Council of Europe is only and exclusively in the enforcement and deepening of its core values,'' said the President of the Slovak Republic, speaking in the Hemicycle on 14 April. He called on the parliamentarians to make a distinction between those themes that unify the present and the future Europe and those themes that are obsolete or subversive.
02/04/2008 | Session
Slovak President Ivan Gašparovic, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner are among the leading personalities to address the PACE during its spring session in Strasbourg (14-18 April 2008). An urgent debate has been requested on the functioning of democratic institutions in Armenia, and current affairs debates requested on the Middle East, Tibet and Kosovo.
17/03/2008 | Session
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Slovak President Ivan Gašparovic, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner are among the leading personalities to address PACE during its spring session in Strasbourg (14-18 April). An urgent debate has been requested on the functioning of democratic institutions in Armenia, and a current affairs debate on the situation in the Middle East. Topics to be debated include access to safe and legal abortion in Europe, Muslim communities confronted with extremism, abuse of the criminal justice system in Belarus, and the teaching of European literature, with an intervention by French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf.
25/01/2008 | Session
The new protocol to the Biomedicine Convention spelling out the steps governments must take to regulate the new field of genetic testing is a satisfactory text which protects the rights of patients, PACE said in an opinion adopted today, on the basis of a report by Wolfgang Wodarg (Germany, SOC). Under the protocol, genetic tests must be for health reasons only, supervised by a doctor, and accompanied by counselling, while the results of the tests must be subject to strong data protection.
25/01/2008 | Session
In the 1980s, in response to the public’s growing sense of insecurity and the demand for more effective crime prevention and punishment, video surveillance started spreading from private and semi-private premises into public areas. Its impact on crime has never been proven, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) now sees it as a possible threat to human rights because of its impact on privacy and data security.
25/01/2008 | Session
Member states should give local and regional authorities the powers, tools and cash to enable them to work together and to further develop transfrontier co-operation, the Assembly said today. According to parliamentarians, the Council’s own bodies should speed up or expand their work in this area, while the EU should continue to fund worthwhile joint projects, including ones at its own outer frontiers.
24/01/2008 | Session
The recent crisis preceding Georgia’s presidential election has overshadowed the “numerous positive steps” it has taken to fulfil its Council of Europe obligations, the organisation’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) said today. Debating Georgia’s record following an address by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, the parliamentarians said there had been substantial reforms of the most important institutions, and a significant number of commitments had been fulfilled.
24/01/2008 | Session
Miklos Haraszti, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, and Andrew McIntosh (United Kingdom, SOC), Chairman of the Sub-Committee on the Media of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), declared today at a press conference that European states must do more to protect media freedom. Freedom of expression and information in the media was a vital element of any functioning democracy.