MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 05th May, 2019) Russia favors excluding the very possibility to introduce politically motivated sanctions against national delegations to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), and the exact means through which this possibility will be excluded are not that important, Russia's Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe (CoE) Ivan Soltanovsky told Sputnik.
PACE passed a resolution in April that proposes bringing Russia's delegation back to the organization. The document also urges Russia to resume paying CoE membership fees, which it suspended in 2017 amid tense relations with the organization. Apart from that, the resolution includes a suggestion to introduce an emergency response procedure, which could be applied when a member state fails to fulfill its commitments or violates basic principles and values of PACE.
"It is not that much important for us in which way exactly, from the formal and legal point of view, the possibility for PACE to implement this mechanism [of introducing sanctions against national delegations], which contradicts the CoE Statute, will be excluded," Soltanovsky said, when asked if this procedure could create conditions for introducing into the PACE regulation changes creating equal conditions for all national delegations.
Valentina Matvyienko, the speaker of the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, praised the resolution in April, but stressed that Russia would return to PACE and resume contribution payments only after these changes would be introduced.
"We favor equality of all the CoE member states in terms of both commitments and rights. We believe that there is no sense in discussing a country's violations of its commitments within the organization, when the rights of this country, enshrined in the CoE Statute, are violated ... We, therefore, favor excluding the very possibility of introducing politically motivated sanctions against our delegation to PACE and against any other delegation," Soltanovsky stressed.
PACE deprived the Russian delegation of its voting rights in 2014 in retaliation for Crimea's reunification with Russia, which the CoE called an "annexation." The Russian delegation to PACE has not been renewing its credentials since 2016, and Moscow suspended its annual contributions to the council in 2017. This move cost PACE 1.5 million Euros ($1.68 million).
CoE chief Thorbjorn Jagland has warned Russia that it could be expelled in summer 2019 for repeatedly defaulting on payments. Meanwhile, Matviyenko said in late April, after her meeting with PACE President Liliane Maury Pasquier, that Moscow saw positive developments in the PACE regarding the crisis with the Russian delegation.
