All news

Russian senate to discuss halting OSCE Parliamentary Assembly membership

Asked whether the document would also suspend payments to the OSCE PA, Grigory Karasin said that this would indeed be the case

MOSCOW, June 28. /TASS/. The Russian Federation Council (upper house of parliament) Committee on International Affairs will consider the senate’s draft statement suspending the Russian delegation’s participation in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly, the committee’s head Grigory Karasin told TASS.

The draft statement is included in the agenda of a committee meeting scheduled for July 1.

"I can confirm it," Karasin said when asked if the committee planned to recommend that the document should be considered at a plenary meeting on July 3.

Asked whether the document would also suspend payments to the OSCE PA, the committee chief said that this would indeed be the case.

"The leadership and the office of the Parliamentary Assembly have recently shown a lot of disrespect to the Russian delegation, to put it mildly. None of the delegation members received visas, so we were deprived of the opportunity to take part in the Parliamentary Assembly session that will begin in a few days. We are now working on countermeasures. In response, we will suspend Russia’s OSCE PA membership. The decision will be made next week," Karasin explained.

On June 19, Federation Council Chairperson Valentina Matviyenko instructed the Committee on International Affairs to prepare a draft decision by the chamber suspending the Russian delegation’s participation in the OSCE PA’s activities by the next plenary session scheduled for July 3.

Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs, said that the lower house of parliament would pass a similar decision almost simultaneously. According to him, after that, a common decision on the matter, signed by the heads of both chambers, will be sent to the OSCE PA president.

Earlier, Romanian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Radu Filip said that the Romanian authorities would not allow the delegations of Russia and Belarus to take part in the annual session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly set to be held in Bucharest between June 29 and July 3.