Hovhannes Igityan: PACE not exert pressure on Armenia

PanARMENIAN.Net -
PACE does not exert pressure on Armenia, Hovhannes Igityan, member of Armenian National Movement (ANM), former chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Foreign Relations told a news conference in Yerevan. According to him, to say that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) exerts pressure on Armenia is senseless. Nobody forced Armenia to join the Assembly, and the country can withdraw from PACE whenever it wants, he said. "The Assembly offers us what we want for our country: normal elections, freedom of speech and democracy,” Igityan said.



According to him, if the causes of the March 1 events are revealed, the Assembly would ask , who was the organizer. “It will become clear that presidential elections were rigged and that the testimony of witnesses about events do not correspond to reality. This is precisely what the authorities are trying to avoid," Hovhannes Igityan said.



The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which held its first session in Strasbourg on 10 August 1949, can be considered the oldest international parliamentary assembly with a pluralistic composition of democratically elected members of parliament established on the basis of an intergovernmental treaty. The Assembly is one of the two statutory organs of the Council of Europe, which is composed of the Committee of Ministers (the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, meeting usually at the level of their deputies) and the Assembly representing the political forces (majority and opposition) in its member states.



PACE has a total of 642 members – 321 principal members and 321 substitutes - who are representatives of each member state. There are also 18 delegates from the Canadian, Israeli and Mexican observers. The size of each country determines its number of representatives and number of votes. This is in contrast in the committee of ministers, where each country has one vote.



Each State member selects its method of designating its representatives to the parliamentary assembly; however, they must be chosen from among the members of the respective Parliaments. Moreover, the political composition of each national delegation must reflect the representation of the different parties within the respective parliaments.



Armenian national movement, also known as the "Armenian revolutionary movement" and Armenian national liberation movement was the Armenian national effort of Armenian People to re-establish an Armenian state in the historic Armenian homelands of eastern Asia Minor and the Transcaucasus. The Armenian national movement developed long after the Greek movement with the rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire; however the factors contributing to the emergence made the movement far more similar to that of the Greeks than those of other ethnic groups of the region. There were individual heroes who sacrificed their life but the movement was an organised activity involving three organizations: Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, Armenian Democratic Liberal Party (Ramgavar Party) (known as the Armenakan) and Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), of which the ARF was the largest and most influential extending to the 21century. The involvement of the European powers to Armenian Question had a powerful effect on hitherto suppressed interest in a national movement among the Armenians, leading to the development of a national liberation ideology and the transformation of Armenian national identity.