13/10/2023 | 11:03:37 Thank you. The sub-Amendment reads – it changes it on 4 points – so I read it out: "The Assembly calls on the member states of the Council of Europe to recognise Vladimir Putin as illegitimate after the end of his current presidential term and to cease all contact with him, except for humanitarian contact and the pursuit of peace." So we make a few changes, we should not finish recognising his government: it is Mr Putin who is president, not his government. And we should not restrict the... 13/10/2023 | 10:51:13 Thank you. This is not much of a debate, because it seems that we all seem to agree on a few basic tenants. I would like to underline the words of Mr Serhii SOBOLIEV. This is not just about Putin, this is happening in more parts of Europe. There are more parts of Europe where dictatorships do exist and where we as an organisation of democratic nations have looked away for too long. Mr Paul GAVAN pointed to Mr Aliyev. That dictatorship even seems to run in the family. There we have the same... 13/10/2023 | 10:06:26 Dear members, Dear Chairperson, What is the essence of democracy? The essence of democracy is that every now and then you change your elected official. The most important elected official in a presidential republic is the president. Today, we are discussing two items on that, the particular item on why Mr Putin can be president in Russia for more than 30 years, and thereby flout the Russian Constitution, and more in general, why you would need to, every now and then, change your president... 12/10/2023 | 18:25:47 Thank you, Madam Chair. Can we look at what's going on here? More than 100 000 people have been driven from their homes. The complete ethnic minority in Azerbaijan is no longer living in Nagorno-Karabakh. This was exactly what we wanted to prevent when both Armenia and Azerbaijan were admitted to the Council of Europe. They promised to use only peaceful means, and now the whole minority was forced to leave. Let's not make a mistake. This way they will not return. This, we treat it today, as... 11/10/2023 | 18:35:10 Well, this would be problematic. In any inquiry, take the parliamentary inquiry on Corona, you're not waiting for all court cases to be finished. And the court cases here were run for years and probably even a decade, because people do not even know who was spied on. So if you don't want any investigation by the parliament or by the government, you should say we wait till the end of the court case, and then we could even end up here at the European Court of Human Rights. I think it's time for... 11/10/2023 | 18:19:56 Thank you dear colleagues, Thank you for the comments on this work, and also thank you for the co-operation. Let me start with Mr Koloman BRENNER because that was the most interesting speech, because he doesn't know whether he's been spied on. It's exactly that chilling effect where you know that your government is using it, but you don't know whether the government is using it against you, which is the dangerous thing of this spyware being used. If we don't realise that here, then we are in... 11/10/2023 | 17:05:47 Thank you. Imagine you have your mobile phone, and imagine someone takes it over without you noticing it. So, there is no link you have to click on. And your mobile phone turns into a spyware of your own government or another government. It can actually listen in to what you do, can use your camera and knows what you're doing, it can search all your messages and all your emails, it can look at all your pictures. And if you use a little bit of AI, that spy can actually figure out that you're... 20/06/2023 | 17:25:41 Dear Ms Chairperson, dear colleagues. After the fall of communism, Poland emerged with a strong democratic will. It quickly joined the Council of Europe in 1991 and became an EU member in 2004. Unfortunately, Poland was the first EU member for which the Assembly opened a monitoring procedure, due to the concerns about the functioning of its democratic and rule-of-law institutions. And today, we have a current affairs debate on Poland because we are deeply worried about recent developments... 23/01/2023 | 17:34:12 The objection is not against that the children should not lose the nationality of their state. That would not be a problem. They should keep their nationality. You shouldn't deprive children which have a Dutch, or Swedish, or a German nationality, and live in those camps from a nationality. The problem is the line afterwards: "they may return with at least one of their parents". If they have one parent, and if it's in the interest –and that's what we said earlier in the resolution– in the... 23/01/2023 | 17:07:55 Thank you, colleagues and thanks for this debate, for not forgetting about what happened because that, and our colleagues reminded us of it, since Ukraine, we may tend to forget the thing that happened before. And we should not fall into that trap. If justice is not being done and seen to be done with the most heinous of crimes, genocide, then we lose credibility as an international community in other very serious crimes, but less serious than genocide. So I fully understand my British...