April 18, 2008

RAFFI HOVANNISIAN and PACE

Strasbourg, France—Raffi K. Hovannisian, leader of the Heritage Party and its faction in the National Assembly, took part from April 14 to 18 in the second part of the 2008 plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) as a member of Armenia’s parliamentary delegation.

Raffi Hovannisian addressed the Assembly on three occasions, the first regarding the Progress Report of the PACE Bureau on the observation of the recent Armenian and other elections (the provisional transcript can be found here); the second during the current affairs debate on Implications of Kosovo’s Declaration of Independence (link); and the third at the debate under urgent procedure on The Functioning of Democratic Institutions in Armenia (link).

In the renowned PACE hemicycle, Hovannisian also privately greeted and publicly posed questions to Germany’s Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel (link), Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg (link), Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (link), France’s Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Bernard Kouchner (link), and Jan Kubis who is at once Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Slovak Republic and Chairman of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe.

In the course of the PACE proceedings, the motion for a recommendation, entitled “The Present State of Armenian Cultural Treasures in Turkey,” coauthored by Raffi Hovannisian and 26 other MPs representing more than 20 member states was referred for information to the PACE Committee on Culture, Science and Education on which he serves (link). Hovannisian attended and addressed the meetings of this Committee and its Sub-Committee on the Cultural Heritage and the Sub-Committee on the Media; the Committee on the Honouring of Obligations and Commitments of Member States of the Council of Europe (Monitoring Committee); the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights and its Sub-Committee on Human Rights; the Committee on Rules of Procedure, Immunities and Institutional Affairs; and the Group of the European People’s Party and its Bureau of which he is a member. He also held informal consultations with Edward O’Hara, General Rapporteur on the Cultural Heritage, and several other colleagues.