President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Pedro Agramunt will most likely will announce his resignation in the coming days,
says Ukrainain PACE member Leonid Emets.
At a meeting of the PACE spring session
the issue of a vote of no confidence in the chairman of the structure Pedro Agramunt was raised on April 25.
Immediately after the apology of Agramunt for his trip to Syria where he visited the Russian military airbase of Khmeimim, and then met with Syrian President Bashar Assad, representatives of the PACE political groups began to demand that the head of the assembly raise the issue of a vote of no confidence.
Parliamentarians demanded
that Agramunt take a decision on this issue, hold hearings on and put this issue to a vote. This is the first time in the history of PACE that the question of a vote of no-confidence has been put forward.
Emets says that the delegates consider the issue already resolved.
“It seems that the resignation of the PACE President is a matter of two days. The probability is 99. After the hearing, he did not leave any options, Pedro himself announced that he will announce the decision on his status on Friday. In PACE, delegates are sure that the issue has already been resolved”, declared Emets.
Member of the permanent delegation of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to PACE Irina Gerashchenko
also said
that Pedro Agramunt hinted that he would retire after the end of the current session, that is, on Friday, April 28.
“Agramunt is no longer merely hinting at his resignation on Friday, at the end of this session”, she said.
Some sources have reported that Agramunt will retire only after the visit of the King of Spain to the assembly.
Pedro Agramunt is also considered a close ally of Baku. Previously, he was the Rapporteur of the Monitoring Committee. His activities aroused the dissatisfaction of human rights defenders who openly accused him of corruption and the concealment of facts of human rights violations in Azerbaijan.
A month ago, PACE Secretary General Jagland also spoke out against Agramunt, who was outraged by Agramunt’s refusal to investigate the facts of million-dollar bribes given to Luca Volonte from representatives of Azerbaijan to ensure the failure of the 2013 Strasser report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan.
Pedro Agramunt was elected chairman of PACE in 2016. A year later he was re-elected to the post of PACE President for a second term.
