Kovacs: Edi Rama's request that the Council of Europe dispute Marty's report on the "Yellow House" did not pass

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama's attempt to dispute Dick Marty's report on human organ trafficking in the Council of Europe had not gone through, Elvira Kovacs, a member of the Serbian Parliament delegation to the CoE and vice-president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the CoE (PACE), told Kosovo Online.

Kovacs states that at yesterday's session of the PACE Bureau, it was decided to create only information about Albania's initiative.

On the day when the trial of former KLA leaders began before the Special Court in The Hague, on April 3, Rama announced that Albania had collected signatures in the PACE for a new resolution, which would challenge Dick Marty's 2011 resolution. At the time, Rama said that in Marty’s resolution, "terrible accusations against the KLA for trafficking in human organs were made without any facts."

Our interlocutor says that it is not difficult to collect 20 signatures, from at least five countries and two political groups, to launch an initiative in the Council of Europe.

"Therefore, that request had to be on the agenda of the PACE Bureau, but it can make different decisions. When someone starts the initiative to pass a resolution, as Albania did, the decision does not have to be that a report should be created from it, as Tirana wanted. They wanted their initiative to be forwarded to the committee for legal issues, to choose a rapporteur, and in the end, it turned out that the Yellow House did not exist. That did not pass," Kovacs says.

She explains that the PACE Bureau adopted the proposal that the Tirana initiative should only produce information, which does not have any political weight, because no report will be made, but information related to the initiative will be prepared.

"It would be really outrageous to question the previous reports and the work of the Council of Europe committee. It would be unprecedented, it has never happened before," our interlocutor says.

She points out that the decision, that Rama's initiative did not lead to a new report of the Council of Europe at the PACE Bureau was made by acclamation.

"The Secretariat proposed that only information be made regarding Rama's initiative, not a report, and everyone at the Bureau agreed with that."

Kovacs reminds that PACE MPs reacted violently back in October last year when Rama spoke at a session in Strasbourg about disputing Marty's report.

"Rama was quite unpleasant and rude in his performance; he spoke against the work of the CoE. The MPs revolted, as did the former presidents of the PACE legal affairs committee," Kovacs points out.