Pace Strips Russia Of Voting Rights Until April Over Ukraine, Russia Quits For 1 Yr

[Purveyor]

Published time: January 28, 2015 19:23

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has decided not to restore Russia’s voting rights until April. Moscow was first stripped of its rights in PACE after Crimea joined Russia last year.

In turn, Aleksey Pushkov, the chief of Russia’s PACE delegation and chairman of the State Duma's Foreign Affairs Committee, said: “We are exiting PACE until the end of the year.” “As PACE stripped Russia of the right to vote in its governing bodies, we can no longer speak of any contacts with the organization,” he explained.

PACE also backed an amendment that called on Russia to free Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko in 24 hours or turn her over to a third party. Savchenko was detained in July and is in Russian custody. She is suspected of involvement in the murder of two VGTRK news network journalists in eastern Ukraine in June.

However, the assembly declined the amendment to the resolution which declared the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples' Republics in eastern Ukraine “terrorist organizations.”

Following the assembly’s vote, Pushkov said that Russia retracts its earlier suggestion on PACE visiting Savchenko in custody. In turn, PACE’s monitoring missions in Russia will also have to suspend their work, he added.

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http://rt.com/news/227107-pace-resolution-against-russia/

[stevenleser]

1. If that's the RT version, Russia must really look bad when the agitprop is filtered out. nt