03/10/2024 | 10:22:44 Mister MORRIS, I am delighted to see you in the chair for this important debate. This is an excellent report by Mr Knut ABRAHAM and very ably presented by my colleague Lord Richard KEEN. Of course, Vladimir PUTIN denies that the Holodomor ever happened. That's just another PUTIN lie, just as he says that Ukraine invaded Russia, not the other way around. As this excellent report makes clear, the Soviet Union always claimed that the famine was just an act of God affecting the whole of Russia... 02/10/2024 | 18:21:14 Is that working now? My apologies. Technical incompetence. It's a pleasure to support the report with my colleague, Mr Zsolt NÉMETH, his co-rapporteur, Mr Aleksandar NIKOLOSKI. It sets out some welcomed improvements, but highlights that some fundamental problems remain and have not been addressed. I first visited Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1996 when I was on a special mission for the United Kingdom government in Mostar. Half the city was in ruins and I walked over thousands of empty rifle... 28/06/2024 | 10:14:18 The report is extensive and morally well intentioned. By "extensive", I mean it calls for human rights protections for a wide variety of things from growing socio-economic inequalities, public health emergencies, wars and conflicts, rapid technological advances, intergenerational inequality and a less anthropocentric view of the environment. I agree that preventing the loss of plant and animal species is vitally important. When a species is wiped out, it is gone forever, and one day that... 26/06/2024 | 11:44:19 Mister Chairman, these are excellent reports. First of all, on an international tribunal, this Council should move immediately to create one. In 1944, four countries, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union and France, set up the Nuremberg tribunal. There was no precedent, no rules to follow, but they made their own and justice was done. That is a model we should follow since the rules of procedure can be replicated today. There will never be an international criminal court... 25/06/2024 | 11:37:37 Mister President. I thank the rapporteur Mr George PAPANDREOU for all the work he's put into this Report and for his good intentions to widen democracy. Nevertheless, I am deeply concerned that what he proposes will weaken the rights of elected members and give more power to unelected and single-issue pressure groups. Of course, we all want more people to take an interest in how their country is run and to participate by then voting for representatives. If you don't vote, then don't complain... 16/04/2024 | 15:41:55 Mister President, what an honour to follow the fantastic speech from Mr STEFANCHUK. Absolutely humbling, but also very telling. I'm pleased to speak in support of this report and I can congratulate the rapporteur. We all want to see Ukraine reconstructed, all the damage restored, and all victims compensated, and Russia made to pay for everything. But that will not happen until Russia is defeated. Ukraine will not be reconstructed, and no victims will be compensated if Russia wins. Indeed... 25/01/2024 | 10:33:01 Thank you, Mister Chairman. I congratulate the authors of these reports for the work they've done in drawing this terrible situation to our attention. It's difficult to understand the depth of suffering these children are enduring, and also the relatives of children who have been taken by the Russian regime. Let's just quickly look at the statistics to get an appreciation of the horror. Some 20 000 children forcibly deported to Russia and forced to become Russian. The Russian Children's... 23/01/2024 | 16:53:40 Madam President, I congratulate the rapporteur Mr Piero FASSINO on a very well balanced and excellent report. It is so right to denounce the absolute horror of the massacre of the 1 200 civilian innocents. It was the most evil and bloodthirsty crime in living memory, and no one with a shred of decency can justify t. The report rightly calls the killings barbaric and the worst genocide of Jews since the second world war. The Israeli response has been proportionate in the face of rape and... 09/10/2023 | 17:46:53 (Undelivered speech, Rules of Procedure Art. 31.2) Whilst she report says that the elections were well run I am still worried that it is too easy to distort results when the electorate is so small. The official electorate is 542,000 but there is another 100,000 in the “diaspora” who may largely be Serbian with dubious “dual citizenship.” There are big flaws in Montenegrin election law but it is more incompetence rather than deliberate rigging of the whole system as I saw in Turkey. Apart from... 09/10/2023 | 16:32:41 The immediate trigger for the recent escalation, is that the Kosovo government, led by Prime Minister Albin Kurti, took advantage of a crisis in neighbouring Serbia to try to cement control in the north leading to some serious clashes. These clashes are the latest flare-up in a long-running dispute that was a major driver of conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s. Fighting ended at the close of that decade, with NATO intervention and the separation of Kosovo (with its ethnic Albanian majority...