Azerbaijan, Baku, April 11 / Trend S.Agayeva /
An Azerbaijani delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) takes part in the spring session, which opens in Strasbourg on Monday.
The Azerbaijani delegation, as before, will take an active part in the discussions, according to Samad Seyidov, the head of the Delegation.
The agenda will be busy, he told journalists earlier, as the session will address many interesting and important questions. The Azerbaijani delegation, as in all previous sessions, will be active in the committee and subcommittee meetings.
A debate on the religious dimension of intercultural dialogue, on Tuesday 12 April, will be one of the highlights of the PACE spring session which will take place in Strasbourg from 11 to 15 April 2011, the structure reported.
Several prominent religious figures will take the floor, including Patriarch Daniel of Romania, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, Vatican, Professor Mehmet Gormez, Chairperson of the Presidency of Religious Affairs of Turkey, Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, Chief Rabbi of Russia, and Prelate Bernhard Felmberg, Plenipotentiary Representative of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany to the Federal Republic of Germany and the EU.
Another highlight of the session will be the address by the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Wednesday 13 April.
The agenda also includes debates on the honouring of obligations and commitments by Georgia, the lowering of the voting age to 16, rural women in Europe, over-indebtedness of states and education against violence at school. The debate on the death penalty in Council of Europe member and observer states will feature a statement by Federico Mayor Zaragoza, President of the International Commission against the Death Penalty.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs of Turkey, Ahmet Davutoglu, will present the communication from the Committee of Ministers to the Assembly, while Thomas Hammarberg, Commissioner for Human Rights of the '47', will present his annual activity report for 2010.
The Assembly will decide at the opening of the session on the holding of a current affairs debate on the mass arrival of migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees on Europe's southern shores.