25/01/2021 | 13:10:18 Thank you very much, Mr President. Can I congratulate you on your re-election? And can I also say that you and the others who are in Strasbourg have a great advantage over us who are having to contribute remotely. And can I ask you if you would renew your request to speakers and presidents of parliament to try and facilitate the attendance of members at the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly because of its importance. Can I now refer to the speech, the rather jaundiced speech, of my... 28/01/2020 | 19:52:34 Chair, I have been very impressed by the eloquence of the debate in both the Committee and in the Plenary and the almost unanimous support for the report. I hope journalists who are covering it will note that politicians from every part of Europe and every party have been supporting them in their freedom and in the right to report facts impartially. I hope that they'll cover our debate today. The criticism that has come to the report I think was dealt with by Mr José CEPEDA who said almost... 28/01/2020 | 16:53:50 Madame President, Thank you very much indeed and apologies for the delay, I had to move from another part of the chamber. Madame President, it's been a great privilege and the pleasure for me to carry out this report on behalf of the Parliamentary Assembly because media freedom and journalists' safety has regularly come back to the Council of Europe and to the Assembly in particular. And the reason is very clear, the situation in the Council of Europe region is not improving. In fact, it's... 02/10/2019 | 12:40:38 Congratulations on your election and on your excellent speech today. Can I return to the point you raised about your need to improve the awareness and the visibility of the work of the Council of Europe and, particularly, differentiating it from the European community? I've been going around as general rapporteur on media freedom and the safety of journalists and telling everyone of the work that we are doing in this area under Article 10 and getting a very positive response in relation to... 01/10/2019 | 10:40:34 Chair, it's a great pleasure to follow another United Kingdom delegate Mr John HOWELL, who is one of the few decent conservatives left in our country. However, he paints a somewhat rosy picture of the situation in the United Kingdom. The situation in the United Kingdom has deteriorated substantially recently. It's very difficult to get answers to freedom of information requests. The prime minister tried to shut down parliament for five weeks so that we couldn't ask any questions and he had to... 26/06/2019 | 19:11:06 I would like to congratulate Pieter OMTZIGT also on his excellent report. I heard today that Pieter himself is now under personal attack because of his report. And I think it's doubly disgraceful that someone doing our work, on behalf of the Council of Europe, in the way that Pieter has done, should be subject to personal attack. I think we should all support him. I'm the general rapporteur on media, freedom and safety of journalists for this Parliamentary Assembly. We've got reports, sadly... 25/06/2019 | 12:22:40 Madam President, we have been a bit too preoccupied with Russia, just as the United Kingdom is a bit too preoccupied with Brexit. I want to take a wider perspective. This is my third time as a delegate here. I was here in the 1980s, at the beginning of this century, and here I am again. Grayer and whiter than when I started. My feeling, however, is that it's almost exactly the same as when I first came here, it has hardly changed at all. This whole organisation is very conservative, very... 24/06/2019 | 17:02:08 Madam President, like Lise Christoffersen, I would like to congratulate Petra on doing a very difficult job very well. This is not an easy topic, not an easy issue. I've seen colleagues on all sides tortured about trying to make up their minds on this particular issue. Now I've been as critical of Russia as any of my colleagues from the United Kingdom on the poisoning in Salisbury, and indeed, on their interference in our referendum when they want to see the breakup of the European Union. But... 09/04/2019 | 16:19:26 I rise today with an apology and a thank you. First, I apologise sincerely to all European Union members for the Brexit fiasco. We had an unnecessary referendum that was lost because the government of the time was so unpopular. It turns out now that it was also a corrupted referendum, as our Electoral Commission has pointed out – which, by the way, has only been covered on German TV, not in the British media. Some supine members of parliament treated that corrupted referendum as an... 23/01/2019 | 18:06:47 The report was adopted unanimously and enthusiastically by the committee. I draw the Assembly’s attention particularly to draft recommendations 2, 3 and 4, the first of which states: “Internet governance should continue to be given high priority”. Recommendation 3 goes on to say that, “additional efforts should be made to promote enhanced internet governance and help Council of Europe Member States to act together to take up the challenges”. Recommendation 4 states: “At European level, the...