PACE DECISION ATTACKED.

Writing in the no. 5 (2001) issue of Moskovskie novosti, Andrei Grachev, a former foreign policy advisor to President Mikhail Gorbachev, commented scathingly on the recent session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. “Several years ago,” Grachev recalled, “they [the Europeans] were concerned about not leaving [Russian] democrats in isolation. But, at the latest [January] session of PACE, ‘there was not enough time’ to hear an address by Sergei Kovalev, who had come to Strasbourg. Today’s ‘friend’ of Lord Judd is the chairman of the Duma Committee on Foreign Affairs, Dmitry Rogozin, who, on the eve of the session, threatened the euro-parliamentarians that, if the Russian deputies did not receive back the right to vote, then the Council of Europe could lose Russia as a member. And, after his condition was met, [Rogozin] announced that the membership of a joint working group on Chechnya, for which the assembly had voted, would be determined in Moscow.” PACE, Grachev concluded, had de facto “given the Russian leadership carte-blanche to continue the war.”