Delegations of Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine to the PACE decided to cut short their participation in the summer session following the return of Russian legislators, UNIAN reports.
According to them, the unconditional restoration of the Russian delegation’s rights without its honouring any of the Assembly’s demands runs counter to the core values of the CoE and its Statute.
“This step sends a very wrong message to the country that has resorted to armed aggression, poisoning of individuals, the country that does not observe rights of its citizens and does not promote but seeks to destabilize democracies throughout Europe,” the delegates said in a joint statement.
The Council of Europe is more interested in protecting the aggressor’s well-being than that of its victims.
The delegates are returning home ‘to consult our Parliaments and Governments about the joint actions in the Assembly in the next sessions’.
As reported earlier, the PACE assembly in Strasbourg voted by 118 to 62 in favour of a motion to limit the sanctions mechanism that had stripped the Russian delegation of voting rights following a late-night debate on Monday.
In April 2014, after the Russian MPs’ welcoming for the annexation of Crimea and sparking the war in Donbas, the PACE decided to suspend the Russian delegation’s voting rights as well as the right of Russian members to be represented in the Assembly’s leading bodies and to participate in election observation missions.
belsat.eu, following UNIAN
