Victoria Tiblom and Yunus Emre, co-rapporteurs of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) monitoring committee, are currently visiting Serbia for talks with members of the Parliament.
Djordje Stankovic of the opposition People’s Movement of Serbia told N1 that he was pleased to participate in the meetings, as they allow the opposition to hear what kind of “manipulations and misleading claims the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) uses with foreign observers and the monitoring delegation.”
“The delegation was particularly interested in the progress of the local elections scheduled for this coming weekend, and they indicated that observers would be present. The SNS commented that PACE always send observers. However, this time they are here with a specific mandate, especially since these observers were effectively sent at the request of the opposition,” Stankovic said.
Stankovic added that another key topic of interest for the rapporteurs was the current state of the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM).
“We primarily talked about media freedom and the judiciary, where laws are being adopted without any real alignment with European standards. We also discussed how elections function here—where the entire power of the state is concentrated on small localities, bringing with it every possible form of usurpation and repression,” Stankovic stated.
He said that “the bottom line is that they (the rapporteurs) are already well aware of all this.”
In its announcement of the visit, PACE said that the co-rapporteurs are due to meet, in particular, the Serbian Parliament Speaker, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, as well as the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Justice.
It said that talks are also scheduled with the chairpersons of the ruling and opposition parliamentary groups, members of the Committee on Constitutional and Legislative Issues, the Serbian delegation to PACE, the Ombudsperson, the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality, the President of the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor General, as well as representatives of civil society.
Source: N1
