Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s comment on the Russian Federal Assembly’s decision to suspend OSCE Parliamentary Assembly participation
On July 3, the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation voted to suspend the Russian delegation’s participation in the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.
This decision was taken in response to the openly discriminatory steps that a number of states took with regard to Russian parliamentarians, who were thereby excluded from the Assembly’s events in the United Kingdom, Poland and Canada under spurious pretexts. In the most recent and particularly illustrative incident, the Romanian authorities unceremoniously refused to issue visas to the entire Russian delegation that was going to participate in the annual session of the OSCE PA in Bucharest (June 29 − July 3). The Belarusian delegation was also deprived of the opportunity to participate in the session.
Such actions by the host country of the OSCE parliamentary body’s main annual event, with the tacit consent of the Assembly’s leadership, are absolutely unacceptable.
Taking advantage of the absence of two delegations, Russophobic parliamentarians used the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly’s rules of procedure to promote their own agenda and quickly adopt a resolution containing phrases like “the genocide of the Ukrainian people.” Our view on such paperwork is well known. A statement by the Russian Federal Assembly’s houses makes it clear that all decisions passed in the absence of the Russian delegation will be considered null and void. Moreover, this resolution runs counter to the February 2 decision of the UN International Court of Justice, which, as we know, rejected all of Ukraine’s accusations alleging that Russia had violated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. No less odious is the resolution of the Bucharest session on the situation in Transnistria, which ignores the realities and has the potential to derail the normalisation of dialogue between Chisinau and Tiraspol, as well as the entire Transnistria settlement process.
It is obvious that the OSCE PA is increasingly drifting away from its main role as a platform for interparliamentary dialogue. With the suspension of Russia’s participation, that body runs the risk of becoming a mere political vestige.
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