Scandalous head of PACE announces his resignation

Baku / 06.10.17 / Turan: "Today, for personal reasons, I decided not to serve as Chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe anymore," the Spanish MP Pedro Agramunt wrote on his Twitter account.

InMarch he was actually removed from the post of PACE head, after the majority of deputies expressed disbelief and demanded his resignation. The scandal around Agramunt broke out immediately at the opening of the spring session of 2017, when he was asked to explain about the trip to Syria as part of the Russian delegation and the meeting with Bashar Assad. In his defense, Agramunt said that he went to Syria at the invitation of the Speaker of the Syrian Parliament.

"My mission was exclusively motivated by the approach of openness and peace," said Agramunt, but this did not save him.

The summer session of the PACE adopted a resolution according to which the PACE head can be removed from office if the majority of the Assembly's deputies express disbelief.

The proposal to remove Pedro Agramunt was signed by 158 members of the Assembly representing five political groups and 36 national delegations.

Agramunt was excluded from the PACE political group "European People's Party". He also became a figment of the scandal over "caviar diplomacy" about the bribery of the PACE members by the Azerbaijani authorities.

It should be noted that for several years Agramunt was the Rapporteur of the PACE Monitoring Committee on Azerbaijan, and during this period, human rights activists accused him of cooperating with the Azerbaijani authorities and smoothing out the facts of human rights violations in Azerbaijan. In addition, Agramunt sabotaged PACE measures for the release of political prisoners in Azerbaijan. -71D-