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Alexander Romanovich: PACE is hanging in doubts 21 апреля 2015 Alexander Romanovich, Secretary of the Central Presidium of the Council for Foreign Affairs of JR Party, a deputy of the JR SD faction commented on the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg: The news coming from the PACE spring session that started its work in Strasbourg seem to bring me back to the atmosphere of the January peripetias with our delegation in which I was directly involved. I’d like to remind you that in January this year PACE passed the resolution which deprived the RF delegation of a number of its significant rights including its voting rights because of the situation in Ukraine. In response, the Russian delegation left the Assembly till the end of 2015. At that time, answering the journalists’ question about my impressions from the PACE meetings, I said that Europe would not be unanimous regarding the sanctions against Russia. Further sequence of events confirmed my opinion. Moreover, it appears that the discrepancies that were at PACE in January have outlined even more now. This is confirmed by the fact that the decision about the future of the sanctions against the Russian delegation is postponed till June this year. The fact is that on the one hand, part of the PACE delegates still insists that the sanctions against our delegation be lifted providing 20 points specified in the PACE resolution have been executed. In particular, we are demanded "to stop annexation of Crimea", release Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, not to provide support to the participants in military operations in Donbas. By the way, the PACE monitoring committee made a statement in March that Russia is believed to have failed to implement any of the resolution points, as if it depends only on Russia. On the other hand, it was no one but Ann Brasser, the Assembly President who voiced the PACE opinion on April 20 that Kiev was dragging out the investigation of high-profile crimes. Moreover, Ms. Brasser declared that Kiev should make a number of attempts to solve the problem of impunity; she also expressed hope for a quick and independent investigation of the recent murders of Oles Buzina, a journalist and Oleg Kalashnikov, a former deputy. According to Ann Brasser, impunity is absolutely unacceptable in any country of Europe. Anyways, our delegation will resume its work at PACE only providing it would have equal rights with all the other delegations, and first of all, the right to vote. It is natural that we did not go to the spring session; and we were not going by any means to make an impact on their decision, and least of all we were going to start persuading someone. It seems to me that the delay of the decision on Russia’s participation is caused not only by the internal contradictions at the Assembly, but first of all, by general atmosphere in the European policy which has changed since January. A lot of reasonable leaders of the Old World have gone deeper into the problem and started to see things in a more realistic light. I’d like to give here Gil Lebreton’s opinion (a European parliament deputy from "The National Front") which is indicative in this respect. He thinks that President of France Fransua Oland made a catastrophic decision when he refused to supply the Mistrals to Russia. According to him, our country is an extremely interesting client for the French defense industry, and the Ukrainian conflict is not a reasonable excuse to abolish the supply. Lebreton also added the following: If the situation in Ukraine is difficult for regulation, it was necessary to interfere in it with the help of a dialogue but not threats addressed to Russia. Unfortunately, it is only now that France starts to understand that the former policy regarding the Ukrainian crisis was far from being the right one. It only remains to see the tone of the discussion of the situation in Ukraine at PACE which is to take place on April 22. At least Moscow demanded that PACE pay attention to the political murders and rampage of ultranationalism in Ukraine. I’d like to note that the problems of international security and participation of Russia in various international organizations such as PACE will be actively discussed within the framework of the international forum "A joint answer to global challenges – the path to a just world" hosted by Party A JUST RUSSIA in Moscow on April 27.
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