20/11/2020 | 15:33:18 Thank you very much Mr President. I indeed already said what I wanted to propose. My proposal is based on the compromise that was reached between the leaders of the political groups last Sunday in our meeting of the Presidential Committee. I think it's for the record important that I read the oral sub-amendment completely so that it is stated in the record what we change in the rules. The sub-amendment reads as follows. In amendment number one replace the words: "second, fourth and fifth... 20/11/2020 | 14:57:48 Thank you very much and great to see you at least, Mister President, there are in the hemicycle. We all envy you and want to be with you as soon as possible. Let me first compliment ourselves for all the good work done in the past months of this year under your presidency, Mister President, and with tremendous support and hard and creative work of our Secretary General and the whole of this team. My compliments also includes our committees and especially our Committee Chairs and our excellent... 20/11/2020 | 12:18:09 Thank you very much, Mr President. And to follow up all that was said by my colleague Mr Georgios KATROUGKALOS, indeed, I think we all should be very happy that, in times of crisis, our ministers were able to come up with this Athens Declaration, and I think that is of main importance that today our Standing Committee will welcome that statement as well, and to confirm that we agree with the main issues that were mentioned there. I am especially happy that there is a full commitment to both... 20/11/2020 | 11:15:01 Thank you, President SPANO, for your introduction. You spoke about more than 61 000 pending cases at this moment, the greater part coming from only five of our member States. Behind these numbers there are always people. One of these people is Selahattin Demirtas, who has been imprisoned in Turkey for four years now and as the leader of the third biggest party in the Turkish Parliament with millions of voters behind him. For him, Selahattin Demirtas, it means if you have to wait so long, it... 20/11/2020 | 10:05:50 Thank you, Mr Minister. It's great to hear you and I very much agree with you that we should do our utmost to keep problematic members, too, in the organization, because it's in the benefit of their citizens. I very much agree with you. We have a lot of them, but one of them is Turkey with record numbers of arrested imprisoned journalists, politicians, academics and with a clear refusal to execute verdicts of the courts, for example in the case of Mr Kavala and Mr Demirtas. How, Mr Minister... 31/01/2020 | 12:19:31 Thank you, Mr President. I would like to start to compliment both rapporteurs Mr Stefan SCHENNACH and Ms Reina de BRUIJN-WEZEMAN on their reports on organ transplant tourism and combating trafficking in human tissues and cells. I indeed hope that the Assembly will be able to recommend today to the member states to sign, ratify, and implement relevant global and Council of Europe conventions and to support proposals made in the report to develop binding legal instruments to tackle these... 31/01/2020 | 10:28:29 Thank you very much, Mr President. Thank you very much, rapporteur Mr Frithjof SCHMIDT. There are, as he says, in this first paragraph of the resolution serious worries about the scale of information pollution in a digitally connected and increasingly polarised world. On the basis of these worries, the rapporteur has developed a report and a resolution that is based on the report to address these worries and to find some answers on how to tackle them. I think first and foremost we should... 29/01/2020 | 20:23:48 The findings of the Committee on the Honouring of Obligations and Commitments by Member States of the Council of Europe (Monitoring Committee) are that Rule 8.2.a and 8.2.b are not applicable, according to the study that the Committee on the Honouring of Obligations and Commitments by Member States of the Council of Europe (Monitoring Committee) made. So to say that here, that would be completely counter to what we already decided and to postpone the vote will also make not much sense. The... 29/01/2020 | 20:19:48 Mr President, may I recall that this Assembly decided in June that we should have a fully-fledged monitoring report at the earliest convenience. So at the earliest convenience is as soon as possible. I want to stress with taking this into the resolution that we do not have time and that we can wait and wait. No, we should have, and as the chair of the Committee on the Honouring of Obligations and Commitments by Member States of the Council of Europe (Monitoring Committee) underlined, we... 29/01/2020 | 19:50:40 Thank you very much Mr President. And thank you very much colleagues. We have had, I think we all agree, a very in-depth debate on things that did happen, are happening, or might happen with regard to the Russian Federation, our member state, and with regard to other countries in the neighborhood of the Russian Federation. Many of the things that you mentioned, many of the worries that you mentioned, were already mentioned in resolutions that this assembly decided upon. I mention these...