Epress.am News from Armenia
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) kicked off its winter session in Strasbourg today, where important items such as the president and vice-president’s elections are on the agenda.
Having been re-elected for another one-year mandate at the opening of the session, current PACE President Mevlüt Çavusoglu made a positive assessment of his first year in office, but regretted that “we could not achieve satisfactory results in some of our undertakings. In this connection, I think mainly about frozen conflicts in Europe. Negotiations concerning the settlement of these conflicts are mostly in the hands of career diplomats, but parliamentary diplomacy plays an important role in creating a climate of trust and confidence, necessary for lasting solutions.
“Be it in Abkhazia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia or on the island of Cyprus, it is difficult to see any meaningful progress in confidence-building over the last year. But we must and will continue our efforts because there is simply no other alternative,” he said, according to the Council of Europe official website.