Rik Daems, President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) announced on Tuesday 15 September that, in view of the health situation, the Assembly's autumn 2020 part-session will be replaced by a meeting of the Standing Committee on 12 and 13 October.
The Standing Committee, which is made up of the President and 20 Vice-Presidents of PACE, the Chairs of the five political groups, 47 national delegations and nine committees, has the power to act on behalf of the full Assembly.
The meeting will, however, be “enlarged”, Daems said on Tuesday morning. “Each member of the Assembly will be able to follow the meeting and intervene by videoconference“. However, only members of the Standing Committee will have the right to vote. He added that the PACE Bureau has left it to him to decide by 25 September whether to convene the Standing Committee physically or remotely.
The decision to dispense with a full part-session in Strasbourg, which had been expected, came at the start of a European Parliament plenary session which had itself been transferred to Brussels. It also followed cancellation of PACE’s April part-session and replacement of the June part-session, again by a meeting of the Standing Committee. It also coincided with the official postponement of the 9th edition of the “World Forum for Democracy”, which will be devoted to climate change. This has initially been scheduled for 16 to 18 November this year but has been put back to November 2021. This event, which is organised annually by the Council of Europe, usually brings together 2,500 people from all over the world. The Forum team is nevertheless remaining active and is preparing a series of online events to be launched in November. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)