Russia’s delegation to the current session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe opposes imposition of stricter monitoring of Russia’s PACE commitments, a senior Russian delegation member said on Monday.
PACE could vote to recommend transfer of monitoring to the Committee of Ministers, the Council of Europe’s decision-making body, as early as Tuesday if the monitoring commission approves it at a meeting scheduled for Monday.
The proposal for enhanced monitoring was made in September by a Polish representative “at the last minute and in the absence of the Russian delegation,” deputy head of the Russian delegation to PACE, State Duma deputy Leonid Slutsky, told journalists.
PACE is expected to approve a resolution on Tuesday based on the recently completed monitoring report for Russia, the first such study since 2005. The transfer provision would be included in that resolution.
Last week the speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament, Sergei Naryshkin, announced that he would not address the PACE assembly because of “Russophobes” waiting to pan Russia’s political system.
“The closer we got to the opening of the PACE session, the more we felt that my strategic proposals were unlikely to receive a fair hearing from the assembly, from a host of leaders and Russophobic delegations,” Naryshkin told journalists in Moscow on September 27.
Naryshkin’s demarche came in response to a draft resolution, prepared by rapporteurs Andreas Gross and Gyorgy Frunda, proposing tighter monitoring over how Russia is working to meet its commitments to the Council of Europe.
An increased monitoring level would be unprecedented, said Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Duma’s international affairs committee, who has replaced Naryshkin as the delegation’s head.
While noting some positive developments, the draft resolution contains extensive criticism of Russia’s judiciary, legislative and electoral systems.
Alleged shortcomings include the harsh sentences handed down to the all-female punk collective Pussy Riot, the slow pace of judicial reform and police crackdowns on peaceful street rallies.
Pushkov called the draft resolution ‘unacceptable’ and said that Russia was completely dissatisfied with it, since most of it “is not objective at all.”
He cited, as examples, the demands to alter Russian legislation on public rallies, review the verdict in the Pussy Riot case, stop applying the federal law on extremism to religious groups, withdraw the recognition of independence for Georgian breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and pull troops ou of Moldova.
“No nation in the world will review its laws, court rulings or decisions to recognize other nations in response to pressure from the outside,” Pushkov said.
