Last week I was in Strasbourg, on a trip with lot of my connections from all over Germany so it was totally a "Tim style trip".  I was in Strasbourg for the Alliance of Liberal and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) group meeting on Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s (PACE) Summer session.

There were a lot of different topics discussed throughout the Summer session and some of them had really interesting titles such as "The fight against harm to the environment in the Black Sea". But on the other hand, there were a lot of hard debates about democratization in Europe and the double standards toward some of the member states of CoE. The ALDE group had a short but really interesting debate on the state of democracy in Europe. The group discussed the challenges of diversity, the migration challenges and the functioning of democratic institutions in Europe. The discussion kept returning to Russia and its involvement in the CoE, but like President of ALDE group and LI Secretary General pointed out: unfortunately Russia is not the only case where we can see negative trends in regard to democracy. On the discussion about democracy there was a lot of interesting inputs related to election observing missions of the CoE in Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Macedonia but also about China and the Olympic games.

Personally, among all discussions in the ALDE group, I found “Empowerment of women in a modern, multicultural society” the most interesting discussion as it opened Pandora’s Box. The discussion handled quota issues and among the women in the group, we had a really constructive discussion on liberal standing points on this topic. So what is liberal: to use quota or not to use quota?

Jelena 

(jelena@iflry.org)