STRASBOURG. - The Council of Europe (CoE) Commissioner for Human Rights should visit Artsakh.

Head of the Armenian parliamentary delegation to PACE and Deputy Speaker of the Armenian National Assembly (NA), Hermine Naghdalyan, said the aforementioned at the meeting with CoE Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland in Strasbourg on Thursday.  

At the meeting, various issues of mutual interest were discussed, including the concerns about the activities of PACE. 

Reference was also made to the general developments in Europe, departure from the adopted system of values, dissemination of corruption and violation of the recognized values.

Naghdalyan noted that reforms were last made in PACE 7-8 years ago, while serious changes have taken place in the recent years. According to her, currently one of the priority issues is to rake measures to assess the corruption phenomena shaking PACE and develop mechanisms for identifying and overcoming the reasons causing them.

The head of the NA delegation also underscored the importance of mutual perception so that the issues related to Armenia are perceived realistically in PACE, the requirements and importance of European democracy being perceptible in Armenia too.

The interlocutors also touched on the recent statements and events on which Ms Naghdalyan briefed Thorbjørn Jagland. The issues on the need of investigating and assessing the inhuman crimes and vandalism of the Azerbaijani side against civilians and soldiers during the four-day April war were also discussed at the meeting.

Ms Naghdalyan noted that the Human Rights Defender of Armenia recently had meetings in Strasbourg, during which he presented relevant materials, facts and documents also on the diversionary infiltration attempt near Chinari village of Armenia's Tavush province in late December, which should be objectively assessed.

''We attach importance to the viewpoint of CoE Secretary General Thorbjørn Jaglan on that there should be no black spots, namely close borders, in terms of the defense of human rights and freedoms, and that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) should act in the entire territory of Europe. We share this view and think that the CoE Commissioner for Human Rights should visit Artsakh, which is committed to those standards and where those standards are fully in use, and express his stance more actively there.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the only zone where the Commissioner for Human Rights and his representatives haven't been to. Meanwhile, this is an important issue both in terms of getting an idea about the real situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and seeing it involved in the territory of the convention jurisdiction, especially considering that Nagorno-Karabakh has unilaterally joined the ECHR,'' Naghdalyan noted.