New PACE President Prioritizes Resolution of Frozen Conflicts in Eastern Europe

The Spaniard Pedro Agramunt has been elected President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) for a mandate of one year, renewable once.

A Spanish lawmaker and chairman of the European People's Party at the Council of Europe (EPP-CD) Group will replace Luxembourgian lawmaker Anne Brasseur in this position. He is the fourth Spaniard to take up this post and the Assembly’s 28th President.

Agramunt has been a member of the Spanish delegation to PACE since 2000. Over these years, he has worked as committee chairman in the Assembly, developed numerous reports and served as the co-rapporteur of PACE Monitoring Committee on Azerbaijan.

PACE’s newly elected president in his speech emphasized that fighting against international terrorism, coping with the refugee crisis and solving the frozen conflicts inside Europe are his priorities.

“Threats to security and frozen conflicts still exist in the regions of Transnistria, Republic of Moldova, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia, and Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan,” Agramunt pointed out in his speech.