22/09/2020 | President
During a private audience on 21 September with Pope Francis, PACE President Rik Daems shared with His Holiness his conviction that a healthy environment should be considered a human right, and his hope that this could eventually be enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights in the form...
22/09/2020 | Legal Affairs and Human Rights
Strasbourg, 22.09.2020 – Rapporteurs from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) have welcomed the decision of the Baku Appeals Court to release jailed Azerbaijani opposition politician Tofig Yagublu into house arrest while he awaits a 28 September 2020 hearing in his case...
22/09/2020 | Monitoring
Rapporteurs from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) have expressed their concern over the situation of lawyers in Turkey after a series of worrying developments – including last week’s decision of the Turkish Court of Cassation to uphold heavy prison sentences against 14...
22/09/2020 | Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
“The world of work will be increasingly exposed to the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, with the particular risk that AI replaces humans in more jobs than it creates new ones,” said the Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development Committee, meeting today by...
22/09/2020 | Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
PACE Social Affairs Committee has said it deplores the complacency of both countries of origin and destination concerning children who are “left behind” when their parents migrate abroad for work, potentially depriving them of support and protection. “Leaving millions of children without parental...
18/09/2020 | President
PACE President Rik Daems will have an audience with Pope Francis on 21 September. In addition, in the framework of a working visit, the PACE President will hold the next day bilateral meetings with the Speakers of both chambers of the Italian Parliament, Maria Elisabetta Casellati, President of...
18/09/2020 | Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
“Today we mark the first ever International Equal Pay Day, a welcome UN initiative. Although the gender pay gap is now smaller than it has ever been, we still have a long way to go,” said Selin Sayek Böke (Turkey, SOC), PACE’s rapporteur on socio-economic inequalities. “The pay gap exacerbates...
18/09/2020 | Monitoring
The PACE co-rapporteurs for the monitoring of Georgia, Titus Corlatean (Romania, SOC) and Claude Kern (France, ALDE), have taken note of the amendments to the law on the Common Courts regarding the process for appointing Supreme Court judges proposed by the ruling majority. “In our previous...
17/09/2020 | Culture, Science, Education and Media
Stefan Schennach (Austria, SOC), General Rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on media freedom and the protection of journalists, has today expressed his serious concern regarding the possibility that the Parliament of Albania may adopt a number of amendments...
15/09/2020 | President
The PACE President announced today that the October 2020 part-session of the Assembly will be replaced by a meeting of the Standing Committee – which acts in the name of the Assembly - on 12-13 October, to be continued on 22-23 October. “This meeting will be ‘enlarged’ to allow all PACE members...
15/09/2020 | Standing Committee
PACE is asking election experts to assess the fairness of different electoral systems in the light of certain anomalies which mean that parliaments do not necessarily reflect the political choices made by constituents at the ballot-box. “Not all electoral systems provide an equal degree of...
15/09/2020 | Standing Committee
The Standing Committee (*) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) meeting today by videoconference, adopted the following statement on an urgent need for a democratic, broad-based and inclusive political process in Belarus: "1. The Parliamentary Assembly’s political...