21.01.2013

Opening speech

by Mr Jean-Claude Mignon

President of the Parliamentary Assembly

January 2013 part-session

(Strasbourg, Monday 21 January 2013, 11.30 am)

My dear colleagues,

Ladies and gentlemen,

I would like to thank you for the trust you have placed in me by re-electing me to the presidency of the Assembly. I appreciate your support immensely, and regard it as an encouragement to continue the action I have begun.

Like General de Gaulle, I am convinced that politics must be action on behalf of a strong and simple idea. As far as I am concerned, this idea is that of an Assembly which loudly and clearly proclaims the values of the Council of Europe.

With this in mind, I would like to begin by giving you a brief account of my first year in the presidency, before setting out my plans for 2013.

Firstly, an initial overall assessment. As I pointed out on 23 January 2012, I have based all my action on the fact that we must change if we are to match up to our predecessors and remain relevant, and if we are to avoid the fate of WEU.

It was clear to me from the outset that the parliamentarians should be fully involved in the reform, and that the PACE should be even more so their Assembly. I therefore concluded that the life of this Assembly should be more participative and more democratic, in short, that we should implement our values.

This is why I have introduced a new Conference of Committee Chairs, which will meet on pre-session Sundays, before and then with the Presidential Committee, so that we can all discuss the agenda for the forthcoming part-session. Concurrently, since most questions relating to the agenda will have been settled the previous day, the time thus freed up will enable us, as I had hoped, to deal at greater length during the Bureau meeting with policy issues, which is obviously our main mission.

I have accordingly decided to hold meetings of national delegation Chairs during each part-session. They are the heart and soul of our Assembly, which is an emanation of our member states’ 47 Parliaments. What could be more normal and legitimate than organising dialogue between them and the President of the Assembly? In fact I have always fallen into line with their views, for instance on the organisation of the standing committees, even when they have contradicted my initial proposals.

My first year as President has also been marked by the implementation of the Assembly reform which I had initiated as Rapporteur of the Ad hoc Committee. I am proud of this. I am thinking, for example, of the introduction of new procedures such as free debates. This procedure clearly still requires improvement, but it already fits in with the searches for an overall framework enabling Assembly members to express themselves. No innovation is without its teething problems.

We are currently suffering from a real deficit in terms of recognition for and visibility of the substantive work which we do to promote the rule of law and human rights. This is an enormous challenge, and although we are obviously not there to replace our national parliaments, it is our duty to ensure that these parliaments can relay our work, that they act as our mouthpieces, so to speak. This is why I attach so much importance to the national parliaments. From this angle, I can only welcome the success of the Conference of Speakers of Parliament last September and the exchanges which I have held with various national parliaments, for example with the Bundestag.

I also requested, and I am glad to see that this is now the case, that new members be presented with a welcome file providing the main information which they will need to integrate into such an institution as this, which obviously differs from their national parliaments.

Lastly, I have endeavoured, and will continue to endeavour as far as possible, to regularly attend committee meetings and to chair the Assembly in order to maintain close, strong and direct contact with the core of our work.

So that, in a nutshell, is the work I have been conducting over the past year at the internal level, I think in accordance with the commitments I made last January in this Chamber.

Before moving on to another strand of my work so far, let me just quickly outline my vision of the President’s role. As we are among friends, let us be frank. Pierre Mendès France always argued that politicians were duty-bound to explain to their constituents the actual problems and the measures which their planned measures to remedy them. He argued that if integrity and fundamental respect for truth are not there, this automatically means that there can be no democracy. I could not agree more.

So I do not think that the President’s role should be confined to deciding on debates or validating interpretations of obscure points in our regulations, to symbolically chairing meetings and various official ceremonies. On the contrary, I am convinced that the role and duty of the President of this Assembly is to provide the latter with political impetus, to represent it as far as possible in the outside world, or in other words to give it as much political relevance as possible. I know that this vision is not to everyone’s taste, and that some people may challenge various initiatives that I have taken, as is their right. That is how democracy works, but in an Assembly which only holds four plenary sessions per year and which suffers from an obvious lack of visibility and sometimes, to be frank, from a lack of clarity as to its aims, who is better placed than the President to play such a role? At the risk of hurting certain sensibilities, I think a strong, determined presidency is required, but as I have just explained and hopefully demonstrated, such a presidency is neither a solitary nor a “dictatorial” presidency. On the contrary, I hope that it is participatory and collegial.

Quite simply, my main concern is not, and cannot be, to desperately seek arrangements allowing everyone to be happy, at the cost of tentatively worded texts or instruments as unspecific as they are vague, ensuring that no one will be ruffled.

Above and beyond the President’s role, the worst thing our Assembly could co would be to neutralise itself by not daring to adopt the requisite positions for fear of coming up against artificial alliances. This would really spell the end for our institution!

I have also endeavoured to place relations between the Committee of Ministers and the PACE President on a more regular and relaxed footing, which is why I have decided to go and present the outcome of each part-session to the Committee of Ministers.

I am convinced of the need for the organs of the Council of Europe to work together to achieve our objectives. I am glad to have been able to visit Tunisia with the Chairman of the Committee of Ministers, the Albanian Foreign Minister and the Chairman of the Venice Commission.

Nor am I trying to promote any kind of partisan agenda. My sole ambition is to proudly bear the banner of the PACE and our values, democracy, equality, particularly between men and women, freedom, human rights and the rule of law.

This effort at co-ordination and coherency is also needed within the PACE.

Another priority which I have announced for my presidency is strengthening relations with the European Union.

I began by attempting to remedy the mutual ignorance which in fact separates us more effectively than any other obstacle. I have accordingly been paying regular visits to the European Parliament in order to attend meetings of committees, various groups and other informal bodies. For instance, I attended the debate on Romania. I twice met with President Martin Schulz in Brussels. I also made contact with the European Commission, in particular Mr Stefan Füle, with whom we decided on the principle of a two-monthly encounter, the first of which took place in Strasbourg on 12 December last. In order to facilitate such exchanges, I am trying to be regularly present in Strasbourg during European Parliament sessions.

More broadly, I have been trying to reinforce synergies with all the other European organisations, and also with the OSCE in the field of election observation.

Another priority is “frozen conflicts”.

While we cannot replace intergovernmental diplomacy, we can, and this is the essence of parliamentary diplomacy, facilitate dialogue, encourage discussions between the elected representatives of European States involved in conflict, without the preconditions which are often used as a pretext for refusing dialogue. Jean Monnet once said that persuading men to talk to each other is the most we can do for peace. This is the purpose of the contacts I have made. May I just pay special tribute here to the Moldovan authorities’ willingness to engage in dialogue.

Furthermore, I would like to underline the importance of our action in our Member States in order to support them and help find solutions to situations of tension and internal conflict. In this context, I cannot but encourage the efforts of the Turkish authorities to engage new negotiations with Abdullah Ocalan. I would like to express once more my consternation at the assassination of Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan et Leyla Söylemez. I immediately reacted on these events in a press release. These executions must not call into question the talks in Turkey.

Broadly speaking, I consider it unacceptable, indeed inconceivable, for wars and refugee camps to persist on our continent, given that the Council of Europe was set up to defend peace and human rights in Europe.

I unfortunately cannot be completely positive about the state of transport services to and from Strasbourg. On the one hand, new intra-European links have been introduced in Strasbourg, but on the other, this positive development, which I welcome, is counterbalanced by the Air France’s announcement of the discontinuation of its Roissy-Strasbourg service. I am closely monitoring this matter. I shall be particularly interested in the question of the TGV service between Roissy and Strasbourg. The more regular the service the more convincing the alternative solution proposed by Air France.

I shall naturally endeavour to continue into 2013 the action we initiated in 2012. I shall strive in particular to ensure that the co-operation with the European Union is as pragmatic as possible. We will have to move forward in the areas relating, for example, to links between our committees and those of the European Parliament, or between the conferences of committee chairs of both parliaments. This is an historic opportunity which cannot be missed.

I would also like to advance along the road to improving parliamentarian attendance at sessions, debates and voting. Of course you have to be motivated to attend, which means that our agendas will have to be interesting. But you must also be able to attend. This is the old problem of compatibility between the work of the national parliaments and the PACE. With 47 national parliaments, we will never be able to perfectly dovetail agendas. On the other hand, one initial approach might be explored, involving delegating votes in both the national parliaments and the PACE.

I realise that this will sometimes require changing principles which are firmly anchored in some of our countries. And yet given that the parliamentarians are mandated by their national parliaments, it is legitimate for the latter to allow their members to fulfil this mission.

Another solution might be to allow delegations to vote at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, albeit at the risk of encouraging absenteeism. Perhaps you could give this some thought.

Similarly, a number of you have suggested the idea of grouping votes together on fixed dates. I think we might also consider this option. My intuition is that if we went for this proposal we would have to confine the procedure in question to a select number of subjects of prime political importance in order to ensure, firstly, that the meaning of the vote is clear to all, and secondly, that we do not encourage absenteeism during plenary debates. There is also the risk of possible contradiction between the debates and the votes.

In conclusion, I can only reaffirm to you the enormous interest I have and will continue to have in your suggestions and observations. Our Assembly is a collective project which can only function with the commitment of all. Do help me!

Thank you for your attention.