The FINANCIAL — Strasbourg, 03.10.2011 – “Terrorism remains the greatest threat to the universal values of human rights.
It must be considered a crime against humanity," the PACE President Mevlüt Cavusoglu said today in his opening speech of the PACE October session in Strasbourg, recalling the the massacre at Utoeya island youth camp, the bombing in Oslo and a recent bomb explosion in Ankara.
“At the same time, our response must be based on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. That is why the report to be presented to us this week by Dick Marty is so important – it stresses that secret service and intelligence agencies must be held accountable for human rights violations such as torture, abduction or renditions and not shielded from scrutiny by unjustified resort to the doctrine of ‘state secrets’. He added that, in the long term, one of the most efficient tools to combat extremism and intolerance was intercultural and inter-religious dialogue.
“Tomorrow we will decide on the request by the Palestinian National Council to become a Partner for Democracy. This request comes as a logical development, as the Assembly has been co-operating closely with Palestinian representatives for years. I am confident that granting Partner for Democracy status to the Palestinian National Council will not only strengthen co-operation between the Palestinians and the Council of Europe but also help implementation of democratic reforms in the Palestinian territories. In this connection, the address of Mr. Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday will be a very important moment for our Assembly,” the President stressed.
“The revolutionary changes in Europe’s close neighbourhood, in particular in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, as well as ongoing protests in Syria are a serious challenge for us. I consider that the Assembly is successful in pursuing a strategy of bringing non-member states closer to the Council of Europe and to our standards. We will observe elections in Tunisia and Morocco, and after having granted the ‘Partnership for Democracy’ to the Parliament of Morocco,” Mr. Cavusoglu said.
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