43 Members of Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe Support Motion for Resolution Calling for Appointment of Rapporteur on Political Prisoners in the Russian Federation
January 29, 2020
At the winter session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe held in Strasbourg, France, 43 parliamentarians from 16 European countries introduced a motion for a Resolution on political prisoners in the Russian Federation (Doc. 15049). The document acknowledges the presence of hundreds of political prisoners in Russia and calls for the appointment of a PACE special rapporteur to address the issue.
As Vladimir Kara-Murza points out in a blog post for Echo of Moscow, last summer, most PACE deputies had voted to restore the previously revoked rights of the Russian delegation at PACE with the main argument being that doing so would preserve legal protection instruments within the Council of Europe. According to Kara-Murza, the resolution proposed by Motion No. 15049 would translate this argument from “a rhetorical plane into a practical one.”
A day later, PACE members were briefed on the issue during a side event of the winter session by Vladimir Kara-Murza, Chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation, and Sergey Davidis of the Memorial Human Rights Center. They discussed both the overall scope of the issue of political prisoners in Russia (of which Memorial estimates there are currently 312) and the plight of several individuals, including Alexey Pichugin, Russia’s longest-serving political prisoner.
The text for the motion for a resolution can be found here:
Vladimir Kara-Murza, Recap of PACE’s 2020 Winter Session, February 1, 2020.
