2008 ORDINARY SESSION

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(First part)

REPORT

Second Sitting

Monday 21 January 2008 at 3 p.m.

ADDENDUM

PROGRESS REPORT

The following texts were submitted for inclusion in the official report by members who were present in the Chamber but were prevented by lack of time from delivering them.

I understand how difficult it is to detail all the progress and all the problems within a very few minutes. As Mr. Van der Brande said, there were 95 000 polling stations in Russia, but we have only three minutes to talk about them.

I want to use my minutes to raise a question: what do we have on our minds when we speak about the Progress Report and progress as such in the well-known areas of democracy, human rights and the rule of law? My pessimistic introduction is due to a very serious question about whether or not we have made any progress at all. The positive developments in democracy and human rights have stopped in many of the member states, including the largest one, Russia. But my optimistic remark is that we must work hard even with these setbacks.

At least, in recent years we have had a significant development in the observation of elections. The public protests against the rigged election in Georgia in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2004 made the role and responsibility of international observers much stronger. I am convinced that we had very good professional teams recently in Russia and Georgia.

However, before the Duma elections, we witnessed the opposite in the Russian Federation, with the attempts to marginalise the role of international observers and to construct artificial obstacles. The absence of the long-term OSCE-ODIHR presence was the most serious problem in the area of media monitoring. I have no time to describe the general oppressive atmosphere for media and civil society. One recent incident was the closing of the regional offices of the British Council in several cities. I was astonished that Mr Hancock and Mr Wilshire did not mention that.

We heard many remarks about strengthening relations with Russia. I should add that any strengthening of relations must be based on common values. However, I do not believe that Russia really shares European democratic and humanistic values.

Why do we not speak about strengthening relations with Georgia, Ukraine or any other member state? Why is Russia always an extra case with its underpriced state of democracy? I have two conclusions. Treating the Russian Federation as some kind of extra case within Council of Europe is counterproductive. Let us treat all countries on the basis of the same standards and values.

If we continue to claim that strengthening relations is progress a priori, even when states do not adhere to our values, we shall simply create some kind of newspeak, as in George Orwell´s novels. I do not think that to replace real progress with such “progress-speak” is the best way forward for the future of the Parliamentary Assembly.

Thank you very much