As we have previously reported, in Paris, the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe (PACE) adopted the British MP Robert Voltaire’s anti-Armenian report entitled “Rise in violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and other occupied territories of Azerbaijan”. Aravot.am spends hours to be connected to Paris to get explanations from the member of the Political Affairs Commission to PACE and the Head of the Armenian delegation to PACE, Hermine Naghdalyan.
We talked to the member of the Armenian delegation to PACE Naira Zohrabyan. She explained, “The PACE Political Affairs Commission can accept or reject the report. It, as expected, voted in favor of the report to be included in the agenda of the PACE January plenary session. There is no surprise to us here, initially, since the planning of the scenario of this report, it was obvious that the problem is one – do everything possible to receive a report servicing the interests of Azerbaijan in the PACE Assembly.” Ms. Zohrabyan notes that British MP Voltaire was not selected by chance, who was always servicing the interests of Azerbaijan, and the Turkish-Azerbaijani-British lobby did everything within the shortest possible time until the completion of Voltaire’s mandate, November 7, to submit this report to the political commission.
Naira Zohrabyan noted, “From the outset, it was clear that the Commission on political affairs will not reject and will include the report into on the PACE agenda because the overwhelming majority of the political committee MPs are the prominent lobbyists of Azerbaijan’ who receive fixed salary from Azerbaijan. In general, Azerbaijan mainly passes any of its projects thru the Political and Legal Affairs Commission”. Naira Zohrabyan considers the speculations unacceptable for accusing the members of the Armenian delegation and the ambassadors that the Commission voted in favor of the report as a result of their ineffective work, instead, they state that “PACE has turned into a Milli Majlis, and if anyone in the Milli Majlis can effectively protect Armenia’s interests, let him go and implement this serious task.”
Naira Zohrabyan explained that after being included in the plenary session and discussed, it is less likely that the Armenian delegation will manage to fail it during the voting of the report at the plenary session. “I do not want to make much ado about this as this report will deserve the same fate as the Atkinson’s report in 2005. All of that remained on the shelves of the PACE, and of course, this one will not be implemented too, as the PACE reports do not have an imperative compulsion and are only advisory in nature. “Definitely, this report that is born as a result of Turkish-Azerbaijani-British tandem and presents distorted reality and is totally one-sided is unacceptable for Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.”
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Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
