Archive - 9/7/2009

The RSO Parliament Speaker Stanislav Kochiev received the Head of the Russian office of "Amnesty International" (AI) Sergey Nikitin. The meeting focused on human right situation in South Ossetia and Georgia during and after the war in August 2008. According to Nikitin, the AI issued a report "Peaceful population on the front-line: Russian-Georgian conflict". "My colleagues in London are planning to issue a sequel report to survey the current human rights situation. I am staying in Tskhinval today and tomorrow, my colleagues are in Georgia. The are also having meetings with officials. Today I had a meeting with the Minister of Press and the Tskhinval city Mayor. I am planning to meet the Prosecutor General and the Interior Minister. For tomorrow, meetings with Murat Djioev, the Foreign Minister and the Human Rights Commissioner to the President of South Ossetia David Sanakoev have been scheduled", said Nikitin.

The Special Representative for Post-Conflict Settlement Boris Chochiev told IA RES about the 6th round of Geneva talks taking place on 1 July
Boris Chochiev: Back in February, an agreement on Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism (IPRM) was achieved within the frames of the Geneval talks. We agreed that all organizational issues will be discussed and settled at the Mechanism meetings. As you know, there were two meetings held – in Ergneti and in Dvani. None of these meetings resulted in our agreement on chairmanship of the meetings. We have suggested two variants. Representatives of Russia and the EU might co-chair the meetings, since these are the signatories of the Medvedev-Sarkozy agreements. We had also proposed that chairmanship at the meetings would be rotating between the participating sides. None of our proposals was adopted.

At today’s session, the members of the RSO Parliament discussed the draft law “On Defense” and the assignment of Carina Tskhovrebova as the judge to the Supreme Court of South Ossetia.
As reported by the press-service of the RSO Parliament, the MPs approved the candidature of Carina Tskhovrebova proposed by the RSO President as a judge to the Supreme Court, and adopted the Law “On Defense” in the first hearing.

On 5-12 July, in Germany, the Council of Europe (CoE) is holding a youth "Peace Camp" on settlement and transformation of conflicts. Representatives of South Ossetia should have also participated. However, as the Chairperson of the Association of Young Journalists Irina Kelekhsaev told IA RES, the participation of representatives from South Ossetia and Abkhazia was rejected – the facilitators explained the refusal with the fact that "the Embassies of Germany and France found it impossible to issue visas to these participants".