18/06/2020 | Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
Participants at a PACE online webinar today looked at lessons from the COVID-19 crisis on child safeguarding and protection, concluding that the pandemic had had a “devastating” impact on children’s mental health, with a special impact on young people unable to take part in sport. The event...
17/06/2020 | Monitoring
Lise Christoffersen (Norway, SOC), PACE rapporteur for post-monitoring dialogue with North Macedonia, has welcomed the agreement on the date of early parliamentary elections, to be held on 15 July 2020. “We commend the political parties - from the majority and the opposition - for reaching an...
12/06/2020 | Equality and Non-Discrimination
Women should be fully involved at the heart of crisis response planning and decision-making, participants agreed at a PACE webinar on the gender dimension of foreign policy in the response to COVID-19, bringing together parliamentarians with current and former diplomats as well as academics...
11/06/2020 | Equality and Non-Discrimination
PACE’s Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination held an exchange of views on 5 June 2020 on “Upholding human rights in times of crisis and pandemics: the right to equality and non-discrimination”. The exchange followed the appointment of Petra Stienen (Netherlands, ALDE) as rapporteur for a...
10/06/2020 | Equality and Non-Discrimination
PACE’s Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination is hosting a Facebook Live webinar on the gender dimension of foreign policy in the response to COVID-19 at 4 p.m. CET on 11 June. Panellists include current and former diplomats and academics involved in this field from the Netherlands, Sweden...
05/06/2020 | Equality and Non-Discrimination
Sexual and reproductive healthcare have been among the first services to be negatively impacted during the COVID-19 crisis. Women have often been left without access to essential medical services such as contraception, testing for HIV and sexually transmitted infections, and reproductive cancer...
04/06/2020 | Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
PACE’s rapporteur on Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, Selin Sayek Böke (Turkey, SOC), has again urged a “strong regulatory and ethical framework” for AI in health to ensure public trust, underlining the need for robust data governance, clear consent procedures, and a healthy balance between...
04/06/2020 | President
PACE President Rik Daems has underlined the need to keep democratic safeguards in place during and after a pandemic, particularly parliamentary scrutiny of the executive, and again warned governments against trying to keep some restrictions in place once the COVID-19 crisis was over. Speaking...
04/06/2020 | President
The Secretary General of the 47-nation Council of Europe, Marija Pejčinović Burić, the Chair of the Committee of Ministers and Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Hellenic Republic, Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, and the President of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, Rik Daems...
02/06/2020 | Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
“The lessons from the suffering of the past few months must be that we need to act fast to contain outbreaks, using tried and tested, effective measures, implemented in a rights-compliant way, to avoid a disastrous outcome in terms of lives lost and burden of sickness, as well as knock-on effects...
29/05/2020 | Political Affairs and Democracy
How can parliaments adjust their role as guarantors of stability and democratic legitimacy during the current pandemic crisis? How can continuity of parliamentary oversight be ensured? Where do the boundaries of delegation of powers from national parliaments to the executive lie in emergency...
27/05/2020 | Political Affairs and Democracy
In a crisis situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic – where an executive, facing a number of constraints, has to take immediate action – how can parliaments adjust their role as guarantors of stability and democratic legitimacy? How can continuity of parliamentary oversight be ensured and where...