Ukraine on Monday demanded the “immediate expulsion” of Russia from the Council of Europe, which may decide to do so on Thursday, in a historic first for this organization that monitors human rights on almost the entire European continent.
• Read also: Nine killed in attack on TV tower in western Ukraine
• Read also: Moscow accuses Kyiv of carrying out a raid that killed 23 people
• Read also: Nearly 150,000 people have been evacuated through humanitarian corridors
Following the Russian military’s invasion of Ukraine, “We demand that a decision be taken on the immediate expulsion of Russia from the Council of Europe,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Chmygal launched, speaking by video link during an extraordinary session of the party’s Parliamentary Assembly. Council of Europe (PACE), based in Strasbourg (eastern France).
It is scheduled to meet the organization’s “executive” ministers’ committee, on which the ambassadors of its member states sit, this morning, Thursday, to take a decision on the next step.
Speaking in place of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was initially planned but postponed due to talks with Moscow, Denis Shmygal called on parliamentarians from the Council’s 46 member states present to “unite their efforts to defend Ukraine, but also to defend everyone from Europe.
He warned that “the time has come to stop this aggression before a nuclear catastrophe occurs or all of Europe is set ablaze”, and once again urged “to secure the skies over Ukraine”.
His speech was greeted with a standing ovation from parliamentarians who observed a minute’s silence in memory of the Ukrainian victims, just earlier in the day.
The day after the outbreak of war in Ukraine on February 24, the Council of Europe decided to “suspend” the participation of Russian parliamentarians and diplomats in its main bodies, with the exception of the European Court of Human Rights. Its judiciary is the last resort for some 145 million Russian citizens in the face of the arbitrariness of their national jurisdictions.
In the face of calls to stop the fighting, without result, the organization, which Russia joined in 1996, is planning to ask Moscow to leave it. In 1969, Greece, under the colonel’s dictatorial regime, closed the door before suffering the same fate.
Russia can do the same. On Thursday, Piotr Tolstoy, head of the Russian delegation to PACE, fired: “Let them simmer in their own juice. Without us.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry warned that “Russia will not participate in the transformation of NATO and the European Union into the oldest European organization into a new platform to strike against Western and narcissistic hegemony.” But for now, Moscow has not sent any official notification of its withdrawal to the council.
“We are drawing a line, but it has not been drawn completely,” Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said this weekend.
He also called for Russia’s expulsion, Representative Yevnija Kravchuk, a member of the Ukrainian delegation to PACE, assured the press that the Council of Europe would be “the first international organization to exclude Russia” if it took such a step.
But if the Russian Federation “leaves the Council of Europe, it will in some way be a tragedy, a tragedy for the Russian people” deprived of the protection of the European Court of Human Rights, warned the Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, Maria Bejinovich Borich. .
PACE meets on Mondays and Tuesdays for an extraordinary session, which is also the first in its history. At the conclusion of the discussions on Tuesday evening, parliamentarians are expected to adopt a text recommending that the Committee of Ministers “invite the Russian Federation to withdraw from the Council of Europe.”
“This is the most difficult measure that the organization can take,” PACE President Tiny Kox of the Netherlands told a press conference, repeatedly insisting that Russia “crossed a red line.”
