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The member of the Armenian delegation to PACE Eduard Aghajanyan gave a speech at PACE regular session. The speech, particularly reads:

“Dear colleagues,

On 13th of September 2021, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution, where amongst other things it stated, and I quote:

6.1. both Azerbaijan and Armenia have binding obligations to repatriate prisoners of war and release civilian persons without delay after the secession of active hostilities.

6.2. considers that the clear intention of Article 8 of the Trilateral statement was the exchange of all detained persons, without distinction as to the status assigned by one or other of the parties;

6.7. calls on the Azerbaijani authorities to release all remaining captives and return them to Armenia without further delay;

Dear colleagues, it is a fact that the Armenian side has fully abided to its obligation in this matter by returning all prisoners of war and other captives without any precondition.

In the same resolution, Armenia was to hand all the landmines to Azerbaijan to avoid any further casualties derived from this issue, which the Armenian side has fulfilled by 100%.

We did this because we regard these as purely humanitarian causes which cannot and should not become subject to bargain.

Whereas after almost a year from the adoption of this resolution Azerbaijan still keeps at least 38 prisoners of war as hostages to gain whatever political advantage during the ongoing peace-negotiations with Armenia.

Dear colleagues, I just want to remind you that this appalling and deplorable act of treating human lives as bargaining chips is carried out in the 21^st century by a member state of the Council of Europe.

I would like to remind you, that the conditions for membership of Council of Europe are pluralistic democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights.

Only those countries, which fulfill these criteria, can accede.

I will leave on to your subjective assessment the degree of pluralistic democracy of a country which has been ruled by members of the same family for over 30 years, and will most probably continue the “beautiful” tradition for another 30 years.

However, my belief is that the root cause of this impudent posture lies in Azerbaijan’s historical record of total neglecting of the judgements delivered by the European Court of Human Rights.

Because the latter is the only abiding mechanism which is supposed to guarantee at least one of the three conditions for membership in this organization – that is respect for human rights.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to draw your attention to the following shameful statistics: throughout the last ten years 97% of judgements delivered by the ECHR have not been executed by Azerbaijan. And when I say shameful, I mean it for this council, because it shows that this organization should have taken proper action in either introducing new mechanisms of enforcements, or by simply denying Azerbaijan’s membership of this organization.

After all, if there is zero effort to comply to any of the three conditions of membership, can anyone tell why is Azerbaijan is still a member of Council of Europe?

Thank you for your attention.” Eduard Aghajanyan concluded his speech.