27/01/2021 | 10:48:44 Mister President, Ladies and Gentlemen, I too would like to thank the rapporteur. I also think the report is quite excellent. I am convinced, however, that it will not be the last. The issue of vaccination will continue to develop globally and we too will have to keep at it and keep looking at how it all works. We all know that we can either defeat this pandemic globally or we cannot defeat it at all, and vaccination nationalism is of course the very last thing we need in a situation like... 26/01/2021 | 17:23:06 Good afternoon, Mister Commissioner. The first question I would like to raise on behalf of my colleague Mr Fourat BEN CHIKHA who is our General Rapporteur on LGBTQI Persons. Governments with undemocratic goals are scapegoating LGBTQI people in order to win majority votes with the effect and aim of weakening the rule of law. How will the European Commission engage with LGBTQI civil society at a national level and draw up the European Commission's rule of law report, and how will you engage... 25/01/2021 | 12:37:02 Thank you very much. I think the progress report very clearly shows that our last year's work was shadowed by COVID-19. Nevertheless we as PACE proved that we are able to uphold democracy, to protect democratic institutions and the rule of law. But we also saw that we had to diminish some of our normal tools to control democracy. For instance, many election observations had to be cancelled and we also saw that some governments tried to misuse the situation to diminish parliamentary power. But... 20/11/2020 | 16:45:33 Thank you very much, A policy that puts equal treatment, inclusion and the protection of human rights, including women's rights of course, high on the agenda is not a policy for fair weather. If we have no other problems, then let us just do equal rights; no, this is a policy for every day, a very important policy. Gender equality, the guarantee that women can live free from violence, that they are empowered, must be a central basis for all political action and must go hand in hand with... 20/11/2020 | 12:04:18 Thank you very much. The debate about the Athens Declaration is a source of worry, of doubt and of consternation not only because some countries used, or maybe I better say misused, the pandemic to declare a state of emergency and thus weaken parliamentary democracy and rule of law. It is also alarming as it puts spotlights on shortcomings of these countries to misuse the virus to further put particular human rights under pressure. I think about Poland and Turkey, who loudly discussed... 03/10/2019 | 17:41:57 It is common knowledge that every third European woman is a survivor of violence. It's an inconvenient truth of course but it's a fact. It's a known fact and it's evidence-based and because of that we can react. You can act. We can decide about laws or measures that tackle the issue. For instance, implementing this simple Convention. For many of us, this resolution was really an eye-opener. Thank you once again very much for that because many of us were not aware that also in the field of... 02/10/2019 | 10:46:51 Thank you very much, Mr President. Ombudsman institutions are important bodies to provide people with their individual access to human rights and fundamental freedoms. I would like to make three points. First of all, I would like to mention that Mr Werner AMON, who was until recently the head of the Austrian delegation here in the Parliamentary Assembly, has been elected to one out of the three Ombudsman we have in Austria, the so-called Volksanwalts. As he was a long-standing parliamentarian... 25/06/2019 | 16:04:42 Thank you, Mrs President. Both reports are extremely important for the lives of millions of women, for more than half of our population. I want to thank on behalf of my faction, the SOC faction, Elvira and Zita for their critical endeavour for the self-determined and fulfilled life for all women in Europe, free from coercion, violence and every bond. There is circulating a lot of intentional misinterpretation of the Istanbul Convention. Some argue the Istanbul convention destroys values of... 12/04/2019 | 11:52:26 Social media is part of the world we are living in. We have to be clear that the same rules and laws that apply in the real world should apply to the virtual world, but a lot of people do not see things that way. They use social media to spread hatred, to defame people and to say things they would not say directly to people’s faces. A lot of digital platform companies take no responsibility for the messages spread on their platforms. They say the issue is down to implementing codes of conduct... 10/04/2019 | 16:51:23 Hate speech appears in all our lives, as we heard from impressive witnesses and testimonies that lasted for hours. It is in all our societies and all our countries. These two reports focus on the spheres of sport and politics but, wherever hate speech or the incitement to hatred occurs, it has the same elements in common. It is deeply rooted in discrimination and the belief that some groups of people are of greater value than others. It dehumanises people because they are a member of a...