Referring to the scourge of corruption in her speech opening the session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), French Socialist Josette Durrieu said on Monday 23 January that former members of the assembly appear to be involved in matters currently sub judice, including activities carried out in positions carried out at the PACE itself. Other parliamentarians may also be involved, she added.
Durrieu was referring to the Italian Luca Volontè, whose case is being tried by the public prosecutor's office of Milan. A former chair of the European People's Party at PACE, he stands accused of receiving more than €2 million from Azerbaijan and is alleged to have brought pressure to bear to have a report concerning the fate of political prisoners in that country rejected in 2013.
As Durrieu pointed out, others have been named, such as Pedro Agramumt, the current president of the PACE, who is also a member of the EPP.
Luxembourg Liberal Anne Brasseur, who preceded Agramunt at the helm of the PACE, said that it was possible that all of this would lead nowhere and that the documents broadcast on Italian TV were fakes. However, she added, within this assembly, the abscess needs to be lanced and that its credibility rides on this.
Along with some 60 parliamentarians from all political groups, she is therefore calling, in a letter to the Presidency, for an independent committee of investigation to be set up to see what is going on. A similar request was made by a series of national delegations but as things stand, the matter is still being dealt with internally, as the Bureau of the PACE referred it to the rules of procedure committee in the framework of a report currently being drawn up on matters of ethics.
In addition to their call for an independent committee of investigation into suspicions of corruption, the Socialist group of the PACE on Tuesday 24 January announced the adoption of a code of ethics, an ethics committee and a study of the situation and rights of lobbyists within the PACE.
Belgium's Petra De Sutter, a member of this new ethics committee of the Socialist group, said that there was an urgent need to react. "'Ideological' lobbyism affects all of us. We are approached by people wearing badges stating 'visitor', 'expert' and so on, and it sometimes takes us a little while to understand who we are talking to. These meetings can be useful, but they must be transparent. The public has the right to know who I talk to when I am working on a dossier", she said. She would like to see the adoption of the principle of a register of lobbies along the lines of the one applied by the institutions of the European Union. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)