2008 ORDINARY SESSION
________________________
(Third part)
REPORT
Twenty-fourth Sitting
Wednesday 25 June 2008 at 3 p.m.
Mr HERKEL (Estonia). – Thank you Mr President. Dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, this morning, when we started our long discussion about democracy, Mr Gross set out a paradox: everybody wants democracy, but nobody is satisfied with democracy. Now we are discussing the progress of our monitoring procedure. Let me paraphrase Mr Gross: every state wants to be democratic, but sometimes there is no consensus on what democracy actually is, as there are different opinions. Of course, we can continue to discuss democratic values and contemporary human rights, universal or otherwise.
Sometimes, we hear about the concept of sovereign democracy, both in Council of Europe member states such as the Russian Federation, and in the non-member states that we deal with, such as Belarus. Of course, we all know about the well-known concept of ancient values; they are quite different from what we see as democratic values and the principles of human rights. Fortunately, we in the Council of Europe have very strict and fixed rules, and we have fixed our values. It would be simple to open the files and look at what is going on. Unfortunately, in reality things do not always work as they should. I must admit that yesterday, in the discussion on Azerbaijan, I was struck when several people raised the issue of double standards. It was a good point. I do not agree with the way in which the question was posed or raised, but yes, there are double standards.
I would like to make two simple proposals today. The first is that we open the documents in the Monitoring Committee’s files on the state of procedures and see how many reports there have been on each country that is under the monitoring procedure. If we see that other countries have similar serious problems, we should ask why some of them have not been the subject of many Monitoring Committee reports, while others are the subject of a lot of reports. My proposal is that we intensify our work. We should not have fewer reports on countries that have serious problems; we should have more.
The second proposal is on special reports, political prisoners, the freedom of the media and so on. If we have reports on one country with regard to those issues, we must have such reports on countries with similar problems. That would be simple; it would mean more co-operation between and within committees. Thank you.
Tervikdokument: http://assembly.coe.int/