Very strongly challenged after his meeting with Syria's President Bashar al-Assad at the end of March, the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Pedro Agramunt from Spain, has agreed to take part in a hearing on Tuesday 25 April.
Agramunt addressed this issue at the opening of the PACE plenary on Monday 24 April and acknowledged that his visit to Syria, which was organised at the request of Khadija Abbas, the speaker of the Syrian Parliament, had been "a mistake" and that he had "underestimated" the consequences of it within the parliamentary assembly over which he himself presides.
Agramunt said that he had made the visit to Bashar al-Assad as a member of the Spanish Senate but that he should have informed all the leaders of the PACE political groups. He also noted, and deplored, the fact that his meeting with al-Assad had been "manipulated by certain Russian media and certain members of the Russian Parliament".
The delegation of the ten parliamentarians that visited Syria brought together members of the Russian Duma alongside parliamentarians from Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic and Serbia, and three members of PACE – Pedro Agramunt, and liberals Alain Destexhe (Belgium) and Jordi Xucla (Spain), who is leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe in PACE.
Agramunt defended himself by underlining his desire for dialogue. "I thought this was a good opportunity to take" in order "to talk to Mr al-Assad about democracy, the rule of law and the defence of human rights", he said, while defending himself against any "support" to the Syrian authorities. He said that he had explained this visit to the PACE Bureau and had announced that he wanted his clarification to be made public.
His recognition of his error was not sufficient, however, and a salvo of motions for order followed Agramunt's speech. All those who spoke, regardless of their political colour, demanded much more than a simple clarification, and went as far as calling for Agramunt's resignation – as Michele Nicoletti, PACE's leader of the socialists, had done.
Axel Fischer, the leader of the Europe's European People's Party in PACE (to which Agramunt belongs) noted that "this visit was damaging to the credibility of PACE" and he called for a "hearing before the representatives of each political group".
After the session was suspended, Agramunt, who was clearly no longer welcome in the hemicycle, was replaced by Roger Gale, the head of the British delegation. Gale informed the hemicycle that this hearing would be organised on Tuesday 25 April. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)