Following the latest developments in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Armenian authorities should think about suspending the activities of Heritage party, which pursues an anti-national policy, said Hayk Babukhanyan, the leader of Constitutional Right Union party.
“Why can Turkey ban a party in parliament and Armenia can’t? There is an increasing risk of war in the region, so Armenia should become a power,” he told a news conference in Yerevan on Friday.
Touching upon the 'football diplomacy', he said it helped discussion of the Armenian Genocide issue on international level.
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.
Current President is Mevlut Cavusoglu, a member of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party
