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On February 24-25, the Winter Meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA) began.

The member of the RA NA delegation to OSCE PA Hripsime Grigoryan took part in the online Meeting of the OSCE PA General Committee on Political Affairs and Security and gave a speech, noting:

“Dear Colleagues,

Today we are all deeply concerned with the developments in Ukraine. We very much hope for a soon resolution of the situation via political and diplomatic means.

The OSCE parliamentary dimension, despite numerous setbacks and challenges continues to remain an important platform for dialogue and political debate.

We proceed from the understanding that in democratic societies parliamentarians represent the interest and the will of their constituents, provided that they have been elected through free and fair elections.

Devoted to democracy and strengthening the democratic culture in Armenia, we have committed to opening an era of peace in our region - the South Caucasus. Just today the special representatives of Armenia and Turkey had their meeting aimed at full normalization between Armenia and Turkey reiterating their agreement to continue the process without preconditions.

We believe that through trust we can build grounds for mutual understanding and for creating this trust our words and actions should correspond to each other.

While Azerbaijan is speaking about “Khojali Genocide,” in three days we are commemorating the Genocides in Baku and Sumgait. While Azerbaijan is speaking about being constructive, at the same time it does the contrary by sending a message to the world openly stating that use of force to resolve conflicts should be acceptable, that attacking NK in fall 2020 has ended the conflict. Whereas, the international community through the OSCE MG continuously repeats that the conflict is not over and a lasting resolution should be possible only via a political dialogue under the auspices of the OSCE MG. Moreover, instead of putting efforts to build trust, Azerbaijan continues the illegal detention of Armenian prisoners of war and civilian captives.

Dear colleagues, unfortunately, the security architecture of the OSCE has been undermined seriously in fall 2020 when we failed to react effectively to the use of force by Azerbaijan to resolve a conflict.

We once again hope for a soon political resolution of the ongoing situation in Ukraine and hope that our Parliamentary dialogue will also play its role.”