At the initiative of the European Reformist Group in Strasbourg, a petition has been filed with the request of the resignation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) delegate, Spanish Senator Pedro Agramunt and Catalan Jordi Kosta.
Aravot.am inquired of Naira Zohrabyan, a member of the Armenian delegation to the PACE, why the group is launching such an initiative and whether how many signatures are needed to make it possible for the aforementioned delegates to be deprived of mandates.
Mrs. Zohrabyan clarified: “If you remember, during the PACE Plenary Session, Pedro Agramunt made a hooligan and cynical speech accusing the PACE independent commission on investigating corruption scandals of being biased, noting that the initiator of all this is the American Soros, Armenian lobby, and that he has a crystal biography. We qualify this as a slap in the Council of Europe. Unlike the former Chairman of the European People’s Party group, Cezar Preda, who after the corruption scandal, when the independent investigative body mentioned his name as a corrupt lobbyist for Azerbaijan, put his deputy mandate down, Spanish Pedro continues to persist. Therefore, we initiated such a signature collection applying the PACE Charter, which envisages that one can apply to the national delegation at least with fifty signatures, and discuss the issue of depriving a member of the mandate”.
Mrs. Zohrabyan informed that within a few minutes the necessary fifty signatures were collected and they are going to hand those over the Spanish National Delegation to PACE.
Concluding the talk, Mrs. Zohrabyan noted: “We hope that in the fall session we will no longer see Pedro Agramunt and Jordi Kosta in Strasbourg. If they do not voluntarily resign, then there is such a mechanism”.
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
