The election for the office of President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was held in the plenary session on Monday afternoon where there was an absolute majority of 164 votes (out of 244) cast for Tiny Kox. Mariia Mezentseva, head of the Ukrainian delegation, received 80 votes.
Tiny Kox has been a member of PACE since 2003 and, since 2007, has been Chair of the European United Left group, which brings together a wide range of left-wing sensitivities within this assembly. He has also established himself as a particularly active member.
He is the author of two very important reports that are devoted, on the one hand, to modifying the Assembly’s rules of procedure in order to fight corruption, something that was unavoidable after “caviargate”, which was linked to Azerbaijan’s lobbying of certain members. On the other hand, he has been working on the definition of the Assembly’s strategic axes, which was validated by a large majority last April.
His election, he noted, was made possible by the rotation agreement reached in 2008 between all political groups in the Assembly. He succeeds Belgian MEP Rik Daems, who returns to lead theAlliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group after a two-year term in the Parliament.
Tiny Kox is known to be a man of dialogue and he worked hard on returning the Russian delegation to the Chamber in 2019, following the long crisis triggered by the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Also known for being pro-Kurdish, he invited Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party in Turkey (HDP), for hearings before he was imprisoned five years ago.
“We are living in dangerous times, with a real threat of new divisions in Europe, and we are in great need of an agora like the Council of Europe, which is ideal for promoting intergovernmental and interparliamentary diplomacy”, said Tiny Kox in his inaugural speech, in which he emphasised the essential synergy already established with the organisation’s two other statutory bodies, the Committee of Ministers and the Secretariat-General, to which must be added the post of Commissioner for Human Rights.
Another “strategic priority” of the new President is the accession of the European Union to the “European Convention on Human Rights” and to the “European Social Charter”. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)