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
PACE’s Social Affairs Committee is calling for a “dedicated legal instrument”, preferably binding and with global reach, to ensure Artificial Intelligence respects human rights principles, particularly in health care. It would lay down benchmarks in areas such as privacy, confidentiality, the...
22/09/2020 | Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
“There is a wide variety of chronic and long-term illnesses – such as Lyme disease, Crohn's disease, or Charcot's disease – which cause physical disorders that are often disabling, impacting on society's perception of patients and preventing them from fully enjoying their rights and excluding...
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 | 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...
15/09/2020 | Standing Committee
In order to avoid freedom of expression being limited in a discriminatory manner while at the same time making efforts to take down illegal content on the internet, the PACE Standing Committee today proposed establishing an Ombudsman institution (or equivalent) with the requisite “independence...