29/10/2008 | Prizes
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) today called for nominations for an annual Human Rights Prize, which will reward "outstanding civil society action in the defence of human rights in Europe".
27/10/2008 | President
PACE President Lluis Maria de Puig has ended a six-day official visit to Mexico (21 to 26 October 2008) by expressing the hope that the country can further contribute to advocating Council of Europe values in the region. Mexico has held observer status with the Assembly since 1999. The President also expressed his appreciation for Mexico’s leadership among Latin American countries in abolishing the death penalty, explained the Assembly’s ongoing work on ‘feminicides’ and urged Mexico to ratify the Council of Europe Convention against Human Trafficking.
27/10/2008 | President
PACE's Presidential Committee, led by its President, Lluís Maria de Puig, will visit Tbilisi on 30 October 2008. The visit is part of the follow-up to Resolution 1633 on “The consequences of the war between Georgia and Russia”, adopted by the Assembly on 2 October 2008. The Assembly’s Bureau asked the Presidential Committee to visit Tbilisi and Moscow for meetings at the highest level with the authorities concerning the implementation of the resolution.
24/10/2008 | Monitoring
The co-rapporteurs for the monitoring of Armenia of PACE, John Prescott (United Kingdom, SOC) and Georges Colombier (France, EPP/CD), today welcomed the Presidential Decree establishing an expert fact-finding group to look into the events in Armenia on 1 and 2 March 2008 and the circumstances that led to them.
24/10/2008 | Equality and Non-Discrimination
Antigoni Papadopoulos (Cyprus, ALDE) will be undertaking a fact-finding visit to Rabat on 28 and 29 October 2008 in connection with the Equality Committee’s work on the problem of forced marriages and other forms of gender-based violence against women, particularly within certain immigrant communities living in Europe.
24/10/2008 | Culture, Science, Education and Media
Andrew McIntosh (United Kingdom, SOC), PACE rapporteur on media freedom and Chair of the Sub-Committee on the Media, made the following statement today: "I am deeply shocked by the car bomb attack killing Ivo Pukanic, the owner of the Croatian weekly newspaper Nacional, and his marketing director Niko Franjic in Zagreb yesterday evening. Murdering a journalist who has exposed organised crime, corruption and human rights violations is an attack on the democratic foundation of a state. My sympathy goes to the families of the two men."
17/10/2008 | Political Affairs and Democracy
At the end of the Council of Europe Forum on the Future of Democracy, participants today welcomed the current work of the Parliamentary Assembly on e-democracy and called on it to “take further initiatives”, in particular with regard to e-parliament as a way to “help parliaments at all levels, as well as elected representatives, to better fulfil their role as representatives of the people”. E-democracy, they said, “can help to restore the declining interest in politics and the democratic process”.
17/10/2008 | President
PACE President Lluís Maria de Puig will pay an official visit to Mexico from 21 to 26 October 2008, at the invitation of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the parliamentary delegation to the PACE. Mexico enjoys observer status with the Council of Europe since 1999. In Mexico City, the President is due to meet the Speakers of the Mexican Senate, Gustavo Madero Muñoz, and the Chamber of Deputies, César Duarte Jáquez, as well as the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Patricia Espinosa Cantellano (to be confirmed), as well as the members of Mexico’s delegation to PACE.
16/10/2008 | Migration, International Protection and Economic Co-operation
Ten years after the adoption of the UN's Guiding Principles on internal displacement, the problem of internally-displaced people is far from being eradicated on European soil, according to the head of PACE's Migration Committee. Addressing an Oslo conference, Corien W. A. Jonker (Netherlands, EPP/CD) said: "Contrary to all expectations, the number of IDPs in Europe has not drastically decreased. Somewhere, our efforts and policies have failed, despite international human rights and humanitarian norms becoming increasingly more elaborate."
16/10/2008 | Election observation
Yesterday's presidential election in Azerbaijan marked considerable progress, but did not meet all of the country's international commitments, observers from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), PACE and the European Parliament (EP) concluded in a joint statement published today. "While the voting day can be generally viewed positively and described as marking considerable progress, election observation is done against a broader background of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. In this connection, the issue of freedom of the media in Azerbaijan remains a source of further concern," said Andres Herkel, Head of the PACE delegation.
16/10/2008 | Political Affairs and Democracy
"New technologies and e-voting must serve democracy. The standards evolved by the Council of Europe, particularly as regards the preservation of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, have become internationally accepted norms which must be applied to e-democracy," Luc van den Brande (Belgium, EPP/CD) pointed out today in Madrid at the Forum for the Future of Democracy. He added: "Likewise, it is our responsibility to keep up European standards for the organisation of democratic elections.
16/10/2008 | Political Affairs and Democracy
“We have a duty to be active and interactive. Electronic democracy is already all around us and, like it or not, we have to live with it,” said Göran Lindblad (Sweden, EPP/CD), Chair of PACE Political Affairs Committee, this morning in Madrid at the Council of Europe’s Forum for the Future of Democracy. As he went on to say, we still need to know how we propose to live with it and above all how to use it for the greater advancement of participatory democracy, human rights and rule of law in our societies, and how we are to reverse the electorate’s disinterest in the democratic process.