HAYK BABUKHANYAN: HERITAGE PARTY SHOULD BE BANNED
PanARMENIAN.Net
29.01.2010 14:00 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ 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