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YEREVAN. - The members of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Greece, Czech Republic and Cyprus delegations voted in favor of Armenia at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) session.

Deputy Speaker of the Armenia Parliament, Eduard Sharmazanov, told the aforementioned to Armenian News – NEWS.am correspondent, touching on the debate on two anti-Armenian reports at PACE. 

In his words, Azerbaijan made a fiasco: “It’s very important that the report by Robert Walter was neutralized. This was the success of the Armenian diplomacy. The aspiration of the Azeris to shift the discussion of the Karabakh conflict to other platforms was neutralized. Turkey and Azerbaijan didn’t achieve their goals.”

According to him, the European deputies opposed the intentions of Azerbaijan to shift the issue to other platform. “As to the report by Milica Marković, I think the social and humanitarian nature of the problem is likely to have played a role here. But there were political emphases in this social and humanitarian issue. If the discussions were debated separately on different days, perhaps Marković’s report wouldn’t have been adopted either. But this is the best of a bad bunch,” Sharmazanov noted.

The Deputy Speaker also said that all the countries, whose friendship groups he chairs, have recorded a positive result for Armenia. “First of all, Greece: 4 members of the Greek delegation voted against the anti-Armenian reports at both votings, two members voting for it. And this happens when everyone knows that the Greek delegation includes Dora Bakoyannis, who has a pro-Azerbaijani stance: it’s not the first year she has been protecting Azerbaijan’s interests at PACE,” Sharmazanov stressed.

Secondly, he continued, the delegation of the Czech Republic was earlier completely against the Armenian viewpoint and voted in favor of Azerbaijan. “Our achievement was that the Czechs didn’t take part in the first voting and during the second voting one of the Czech senators voted against the pro-Azerbaijani report,” Sharmazanov said.

Referring to the Baltic countries, the Deputy Speaker said that the latter never manifested such united support for the Armenian standpoint. “Latvia ensured 100 percent results: 0 votes “for” and 2 votes “against.” Estonia voted similarly, and the votes of Lithuania were divided the following way: 2 votes “against” and 1 vote “for,” Sharmazanov stated.

He also thanked the delegation members of those countries, the chairman of whose friendship groups he is, for support and understanding that the adoption of the two aforementioned reports posed threat to the peace in the region. ”I would also like to thank all three Armenian ambassadors – Ara Ayvazyan (Lithuania), Gagik Ghalatchian (Greece) and Tigran Seyranyan (Czech Republic), as well as the representatives of our Diaspora,” the Deputy Speaker said.

PACE on Tuesday voted against MP Robert Walter’s (UK) anti-Armenian report entitled “Escalation of Violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and Other Occupied Territories of Azerbaijan,” but adopted MP Milica Marković’s (Bosnia and Herzegovina) anti-Armenian report about Sarsang Reservoir in Nagorno-Karabakh, and entitled “Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water.” 

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