At the autumn session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg, on Wednesday the report on the functioning of democratic institutions in Georgia gave rise to a dispute. Member of the Estonian delegation Liisa Pakosta in her speech considered the positions of the report too modest.

“Georgia is on the right path in the development of democracy, but the most burning problem at the moment is the territorial integrity of Georgia. Recent presidential elections in Abkhazia were a farce, and they should be explicitly condemned both by the international media and this report,” Pakosta said.

In Pakosta’s opinion, Russia’s aggression against territorial integrity is very similar in Georgia and Ukraine.

“Europe must not forget the war in Georgia It is regrettable that on the continent of Europe there have been so-called grey zones, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, for more than six years. International organisations and human rights experts have no access to these areas,” said Pakosta.

Pakosta stressed that it is necessary to support multi-party free democracy in Georgia. “Attempts to suppress opposition with arrests and politically motivated prosecutions put Georgia’s democracy to danger, but still there are very many positive developments in the country,” said Pakosta. Pakosta called on her European colleagues keep all the doors open to help Georgia’s EU and NATO aspirations.

In the report, the PACE welcomes the comprehensive reforms carried out by the Georgian authorities to strengthen the democratic institutions and to ensure a genuinely independent justice system (link to the report: http://www.assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=21123&lang=en).

On Wednesday evening, current affairs debate on the crisis in Ukraine, led by the member of the Estonian delegation Mailis Reps, is on the agenda of the PACE Session.

The Riigikogu Press Service