27/04/2009 | Session
Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) President Lluís Maria de Puig, Yves le Tallec, Departmental Councillor (Conseiller Général) of the Bas-Rhin (France) and Atle Faye, representative of the European Museum Forum will present, on Tuesday 28 April, the 2009 Museum Prize to the Zeeuws Museum of Middelburg (Netherlands), during a ceremony organised at the Palais Rohan. The museum will be presented with a bronze statuette, “La femme aux beaux seins” by Joan Miró, which the museum will keep for a year, as well as a diploma and a cheque for 5,000 euros.
27/04/2009 | Session
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) today elected Christos Pourgourides (PPE/DC) Vice-President for Cyprus.
27/04/2009 | Session
Adopting the final agenda of its spring plenary session (Strasbourg, 27-30 April 2009), PACE this morning decided to hold an urgent debate on Wednesday 29 April at 3 p.m. on the election process for the Council of Europe Secretary General. The Assembly also noted that the President of the Government of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was to address the Assembly on Wednesday 29 April 2009 at 5.30 pm. The Minister for Foreign Affairs and Co-operation of Spain, Miguel Angel Moratinos, will address the Assembly the following day, Thursday 30 April at 11 a.m. in his capacity as Chair of the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers.
23/04/2009 | Session
Humayra Abedin, a doctor who was born in Bangladesh and is working in the United Kingdom, will give a press conference in Room 1 at 11.00 am on Tuesday 28 April, on the fringes of the PACE spring session. Accompanied by her lawyer, Anne-Marie Hutchinson, Dr Abedin will describe being held captive in Bangladesh by her family and forced to marry, and the happy ending to this affair, thanks to the new legislation on forced marriages adopted by the United Kingdom in 2007.
17/04/2009 | Session
Addresses by Finnish President Tarja Halonen and Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero are among highlights of the PACE spring session in Strasbourg on 27-30 April 2009. On the first day of the session there will be a short celebration to mark the 60th anniversary of the Council of Europe. Two requests for debates under urgent procedure have been submitted, one from the Socialist Group on the functioning of democratic institutions in Moldova, and one from the Committee of Ministers for an opinion on draft Protocol No. 14 bis to the European Convention on Human Rights, which aims at simplifying the internal procedures of the European Court of Human Rights.
30/01/2009 | Session
PACE today called for an international convention which clearly defines environmentally-induced migration for the first time. More cross-disciplinary research is needed to understand the complex links between population movements and climate, the parliamentarians said. Debating a report by Tina Acketoft (Sweden, ALDE), the Assembly said that above all, governments must tackle the root cause of this looming problem – co-ordinated and swift action at all levels to deal with dangerous environmental degradation.
30/01/2009 | Session
In line with the conclusions by Lydie Err (Luxembourg, SOC), rapporteur for the Equal Opportunities Committee, the Assembly today unanimously adopted a resolution asking Mexico to step up its efforts to combat «feminicides» – the murder of a woman because she is a woman. The text follows a previous 2005 resolution on “Disappearance and murder of a great number of women and girls in Mexico”,in which PACE called on the Mexican Congress to complete the planned constitutional and legislative reforms to fight impunity for such grave human rights violations.
30/01/2009 | Session
In a debate on electronic democracy, based on a report by Zoltán Szabó (Hungary, SOC), PACE pointed out that "e-tools may be highly instrumental in strengthening traditional representative democracy and in contributing to the improvement of its quality", while at the same time pointing to the potential risks posed for democracy by the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as unequal access and possible misuse.
29/01/2009 | Session
According to PACE, memorials of disputed symbolic significance must not become sources of tension in intra-state relations or between different communities. In a resolution adopted today on the basis of the conclusions of Mátyás Eörsi (Hungary, ALDE), PACE Political Affairs Committee rapporteur on “Attitude to memorials exposed to different historical interpretations,” the Assembly called on member states to initiate the broadest possible debate about the fate of controversial memorials, involving historians, active members of civil society and political leaders.
29/01/2009 | Session
Council of Europe governments should closely regulate private military and security companies to ensure that in practice their personnel meet the human rights standards which apply to regular armies and state security services, according to PACE. After debating a report by Wolfgang Wodarg (Germany, SOC), the parliamentarians called for a convention which would require such firms to be more transparent, and to seek parliamentary approval for any foreign missions they carried out. Any laws and rules applying to the regular army or police should also apply to them.
29/01/2009 | Session
At the end of an urgent debate on the consequences of the global financial crisis, PACE today reminded the European governments of “their responsibility to protect citizens’ social and human rights”. The disastrous impact of the crisis “could possibly threaten to undermine the very foundations of democracy”. According to the parliamentarians, it is vital that economic solidarity, coordination and co-operation should be exercised not only among the Council of Europe member states and between the industrialised states, but also vis-à-vis the developing countries.
29/01/2009 | Session
The PACE Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men today elected the members of the Gender Equality Prize jury, including its chairperson. Having topped the voting, the Swedish politician, Lena Hjelm-Wallén, will chair the jury. In twenty years of office in the Swedish government, Ms Hjelm-Wallén served as Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs, Minister responsible for International Development Co-operation, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister. The deadline for submitting candidatures for the prize has been extended to 1 June 2009.