2009 ORDINARY SESSION

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(Third part)

REPORT

Twenty-third Sitting

Wednesday 24 June 2009 at 3 p.m.

3. The state of human rights in Europe and the progress of the Assembly’s monitoring procedure

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Mr HERKEL (Estonia). – I would like to thank our colleagues who have unfortunately left. I also congratulate the rapporteur, because it was not as easy a report to produce as it might seem to be. Such a general report is, to some extent, much more complicated than a country report. During our committee meeting in Paris, I used a slightly ironic term about comparative monitoring after you, Mr Holovaty, started to convince the committee that comparison is not the main aim of this report, which simply collects and uses several facts from the monitoring reports and from the Amnesty International findings. When we started to go through it paragraph by paragraph, the first amendment was to take out one country from the catalogue. The report has several critical catalogues about the intimidation of journalists and the functioning of the judiciary. The final stage of the report, with amendments, is good.

The second question I would like to raise is a general concern about our Organisation and its values. To be honest, we have witnessed a setback in many fields. For example, yesterday we decided that the special guest status of Belarus should be restored. That is a big hope and big risk at the same time. I rather agree with those of our colleagues who argued that this is not so much about progress in Belarus but much more about lowering the standard in our member states.

In this part-session, we are not dealing with Georgia and Russia. We decided to deal with the credentials of Ukraine instead of the credentials of the Russian Federation, which is a much more important problem. For a long time, the regular report on the Russian Federation was not presented by the Monitoring Committee. A human rights report from the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights on the North Caucasus was also not discussed for a very long time. That was one of the items in the speech by the representative from Human Rights Watch.

      We face difficult procedural problems not only in the Assembly but also in the Council and between the institutions that make up the Organisation. That is a strange reflection of our inability to deal with many of the problems faced by our continent.

Tervikdokument: http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=/Documents/Records/2009/E/0906241500E.htm