As we have already informed, the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe (PACE) passed the report “The activity of democratic institutions in Azerbaijan” at the plenary session with 140 votes “pro”, 13 “cons” and 8 “abstained”. Initially, this report contained the term “the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven other districts by Armenia”. Shortly before, the member of the Armenian delegation to PACE, Arpine Hovhannisyan, informed Aravot.am that this term was substituted with the following wording: “The Assembly is well-aware of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict” and the Assembly has passed the report just in this way.
We were curious to learn how they managed to do it, whether the Armenian delegation had conducted a special work or the PACE delegates have come to their senses, Arpine Hovhannisyan replied, “A number of amendments were suggested by both the Armenian delegation and the PACE other members. I have submitted the proposed amendments. The whole process was very complicated, in fact, several options of amendments were submitted: to eliminate the whole paragraph and replace it with another vocabulary, which is in compliance with the standards of the OSCE Minsk Group. The ratio of the votes was very close. A couple of proposals were rejected by the distribution of votes 81/81 or 78/83.” As conveyed by Arpine Hovhannisyan, the Azerbaijani lobbyists had concentrated all their efforts were in full. She informed that still in the monitoring, the Monitoring Committee had accepted the amendment and had decided to eliminate the problematic term associated with Nagorno-Karabakh from the report. However, as informed by the member of the Armenian delegation to the PACE, Azerbaijan going against the principles of the Assembly, according to which the voting was conducted in line with the decision of the Monitoring Committee, wanted to do everything to have other voting but it failed. Among the factors, Arpine Hovhannisyan mentioned the following, “First of all, the efforts of the Armenian delegation, a huge work has been done by our diplomatic representative, the Foreign Ministry. Ultimately, the commonsense by a number of PACE delegates was also a factor who realized what is actually going on rather than taking the role of Azerbaijan’s lawyers as some others did.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
