Strasbourg, 10/04/2014 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 10 April, the Russian delegation to PACE was suspended from several of its rights, over Russia's annexation of Crimea.
The Ukrainian crisis and the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation were the epicentre of this spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). On Monday 7 April, the committee on the honouring of obligations and commitments by its member states (“monitoring committee”) was presented with two resolutions signed by the required number of parliamentarians to decide on sanctions against Moscow, with this committee, supported by the “committee on regulations”, tasked with drafting a text which was put to the vote on Thursday 10 April.
There were two possible options: simply removing the powers of the delegation, or suspending its voting rights until January 2015. On Tuesday 8 April, it was announced that the second path had been chosen (which appeared a lesser evil from Moscow's point of view), until the adoption of a certain amendment 7 definitively put the cat among the pigeons. As well as the voting rights, this amendment strips the 18 Russians who make up the delegation of the Duma of their right to take part in the “bureau of the Assembly”, the “presidential committee”, the “permanent committee” and election observation missions.
Immediately after the vote, Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian delegation to the Council of Europe, announced at a press conference that the whole delegation was immediately walking out of the spring session of PACE in protest and that it was even considering not attending the last two parts of the 2014 session, the summer and the autumn meetings. The decision on this will be taken over the next few weeks, Pushkov said. “This vote has deprived us of all our powers, there is no further point to our presence and we will take the consequences of it”, he said.
At the debate on “recent elements in Ukraine: threats to the functioning of the democratic institutions” on Wednesday 9 April, which was attended by the Russian delegation, unlike the session on Thursday on the sanctions against it, Pushkov argued that “the danger did not come from Russia”, that the Ukrainian government “had no constitutional power” and that “10 million Russian-speaking Ukrainians had called for annexation”. His Socialist colleague Leonid Slutsky referred to Ukraine as “a virtual country” where PACE refused to “listen to the people on the street”. “No shots were fired in this annexation and there have been no victims”, Pushkov told his press conference. For the time being at least, the continuation of dialogue, which the monitoring committee sought to preserve by picking the “soft” option of simply removing voting rights, has broken down. The rapporteur on the resolution, Austrian Socialist Stefan Schennach, said at the start of the debate: “Our assembly is the only political body which does not pursue geopolitical objectives. Its aim is to defend the principles of the rule of law, human rights and democracy and to ensure that these are respected by the member states of the Council of Europe. However, there can be no military intervention or annexation between these member states, that is quite clear”. That being the case, he felt that the tough sanctions route was ruled out because “dialogue with the Russian Federation is vital for peace and stability in Ukraine”. No return to the Cold War, echoed several speakers in the chamber, in the shadow of the violent developments this week in the east of the country. Georgian Liberal Tinatin Khidasheli, who pointed out that five years ago, at the time of the crisis in South Ossetia, PACE had ultimately decided not to suspend the voting rights of the Russian delegation, Putin has simply been picking up pieces which he feels belonged to Russia by “creating a new international law: his own”. “The democratic world does not know how to deal with somebody like him”, she continued. And this was more or less the feeling left behind by these two days of debates and votes on the Ukrainian crisis at PACE. From the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to its secretary general, Thorbjørn Jagland, via the president of its Parliamentary Assembly, Anne Brasseur, everybody was united in firmly condemning Russia's annexation of Crimea and in giving no legal value to the accompanying referendum. However, the attitude to be adopted towards Russia, which has been deaf to any logic other than its own but which remains a vital partner in resolving crises, such as the one raging in Syria, and is a major contributor to the budget of the Council of Europe to boot, has still to be decided upon. PACE, which is keen to win back political weight on the international scene, could not remain inactive in the face of a conflict between two member states of the Council of Europe. “It is our credibility which is at stake”, said Danish Liberal Michael Aastrup Jensen, who supported tougher sanctions than simply stripping Russia of its voting rights. His point of view gained considerable support. It remains to be seen what effect the decision made in Strasbourg on Thursday will have on Moscow's attitude, given that the resolution, which was adopted by 145 votes to 21, with 22 abstentions, stipulates that the Assembly reserves the right to cancel “all” the powers of the Russian delegation, if the Russian Federation does not begin to de-escalate the situation and change its mind over the annexation of Crimea. (VL)