Pantic Pilja: Rama's overthrowing of Marty's report in the Council of Europe will not pass; it would be an unprecedented scandal

The head of the permanent delegation of the National Assembly of Serbia to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Biljana Pantic Pilja, tells Kosovo Online that Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama's attempts to refute Dick Marty's report on human organ trafficking in Kosovo and Albania will not pass in this organization, and adds that such a thing would be an "unprecedented scandal".

Pantic Pilja believes that the action of the official Tirana to submit a new resolution to the Council of Europe, which would challenge the Council of Europe resolution adopted on the basis of Marty's report, has a political connotation.

"It is connected with the beginning of the trial in The Hague of the leaders of the so-called KLA and is aimed at exerting a kind of pressure. Edi Rama announced something like this when he addressed the PACE in October last year. That was then met with great indignation in the plenum by the deputies who also referred to the rules of procedure, and the head of the Swiss delegation also spoke, given that Dick Marty is from Switzerland. It would really be a kind of precedent if such an initiative was even on the agenda," Panti Pilja said.

She emphasizes that it is not a big problem to gather signatures for an initiative and says that 20 signatures of MPs from five countries and two political groups are needed in order for it to be on the agenda of the PACE Bureau.

"The Bureau meets on April 24, when the assembly session begins, and I am honestly convinced that it will not pass at the Bureau. It would really be a scandal to challenge Dick Marty's report, which was adopted by the PACE with 169 votes of deputies. It was not adopted in the Serbian national parliament; it was adopted in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and 47 countries voted for it. It would really be a kind of scandal if the countries that voted for that report say 'Well now it doesn't apply'. As far as I know, something like that has never happened." our interlocutor says.

Pantic Pilja believes that, unfortunately, official Tirana will probably not give up trying to launch an initiative to dispute Marty's report, although, she believes, it is doomed to failure in advance.

"For the sake of political points and because it will be discussed in public and certain kinds of pressures, I believe that they will continue to 'brag about it'. But I really think that it cannot pass the Bureau and be found at the plenum; to revise a decision made by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. If something like that were to happen, which I don't believe, then I don't even see the point of respecting any decisions and recommendations and resolutions of the PACE. We are used to double standards and hypocrisy when it comes to Serbia, but this is not a resolution proposed by the Serbs but by Dick Marty, who was a member of the Swiss delegation and the chairman of the Committee for Legal Affairs. So it was a supranational issue at the time," Pantic Pilja says.