Four times a year does the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) convene, and IFLRY is traditionally present in order to support the Assembly of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE). From the 13th to the 16th of April another PACE meeting took place in Strasbourg (France). IFLRY was represented by Jan van Run, one of the IFLRY auditors and International Officer of JOVD. Find below his blog post:

Two weeks before the April session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the council of Europe I received an e-mail asking whether I’d like to go there to help out the ALDE group for a bit and hang around the meetings afterwards.

Being a political junky, the hanging around part sounded quite appealing especially when one realizes that Gasparovic, Merkel and Timochenko would be giving speeches at noon on the three days I’d be there. So the decision was taken in a split second and off we were, by ICE to Strasbourg.

I arrived on Sunday evening and met up with my roommate, drank some beer and went to bed. On Monday morning I had to be present in the palais de l’europe at 0815, of course this seems early…. And indeed it is! The meeting started in time and was finished in time as well!

The meeting was quite interesting, especially the debates were great. People were actually debating in a way one rarely sees, then again there were over 20 countries present in the meeting and as we know at IFLRY, liberalism can have very different meanings in different countries. Especially when you put together national politicians as is done in PACE.

At noon I got to listen to a rather poor speech by mister Gasparovic, a real let-down unfortunately. The rest of the afternoon we had lunch and coffee and at 1700 we had the second group meeting of the day after which we took a bus to Germany for the traditional asparagus dinner which was very nice.

Tuesday was a free day but since Angela Merkel would be delivering her speech this day, I decided to go in in time which was a good decision, the entire hemicycle was filled, both the members and the guests showed up in drones. Merkel didn’t disappoint at all, her vision was clear and strong. But could of course be more liberal. Afterwards I went on to walk through the beautiful city of Strasbourg.

On Wednesday we had one more short meeting with the group after which I had time to listen to a fairly interesting speech by miss Timochenko, it is of course interesting that the Russians are present in the CoE as well. As one might imagine they had some questions prepared but unfortunately I had to catch my train and couldn’t stay for most of the questions.

For more information on IFLRY's involvement in the Council of Europe, please contact the IFLRY Office: office@iflry.org .