Watchdog

BRUSSELS -- The president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has been stripped of his leadership powers after he joined Russian State Duma deputies on a trip to Syria to meet with President Bashar al-Assad.

The Bureau of PACE on April 28 said PACE President Pedro Agramunt is "no longer authorized to undertake any official visits, attend meetings, or make public statements on behalf of the assembly in his capacity as president."

Agramunt, who says he traveled to Syria in his capacity as a Spanish senator, had first gone to Moscow and then boarded a Russian plane to Damascus.

Agramunt is regarded by many as pro-Russian and has worked to bring Moscow back into the fold of the assembly after its delegation was stripped of its voting rights in 2014.

Russia has since boycotted PACE meetings and did not register a delegation for the current PACE session, which started in January.

PACE Senior Vice President Roger Gale said, "The bureau felt it necessary to take these steps" to issue a vote of no confidence and to strip him of his powers because the president "cannot be compelled to resign."

"The president chose not to attend the bureau today and has not presented a letter of resignation," Gale said.

He added, "The standards and principles of the Parliamentary Assembly are more important than any individual member, and the integrity of our assembly must be upheld."

Ukraine's Oleksiy Goncharenko, an assembly member, said, "It is sickening to see that the president of this assembly has been photographed with someone who has gassed his own population," referring to charges that Assad's regime used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.

Agramunt became the president of the Strasbourg-based PACE in January 2016.

PACE is made up of more than 300 members of national parliaments across Europe. It gathers in Strasbourg to discuss matters related to human rights, the rule of law, and anticorruption measures.

Notorious former Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has held talks with government representatives in eastern Afghanistan after years outside the country, his first public meetings with officials from the Western-backed government since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

The meetings on April 28 came after Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami militant group signed a peace agreement with President Ashraf Ghani's government in September. Under the deal, he was granted amnesty for past offenses in exchange for ending his violent 15-year insurgency against the government.

The controversial peace deal has been criticized by many Afghans and by Western rights groups, which accuse Hekmatyar's forces of gross human rights violations during Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s and cite their deadly attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces since 2001.

Hekmatyar met on April 28 with Laghman Province Governor Abdul Jabar Naimi and Ghani’s security adviser, Juma Khan Hamdard.

He arrived two days earlier in the province, which lies between Kabul and the border with Pakistan, where he is believed to have been in hiding.

Naimi said Hekmatyar had "promised full cooperation" with the government and added that he hoped the peace deal would "revive hopes for enduring peace in Afghanistan," according to a statement.

Hekmatyar had been expected to make a public appearance in Laghman on April 28, marked in Afghanistan as the 25th anniversary of the defeat in 1992 of the formerly Soviet-backed government by armed insurgents known as the mujahedin.

But the event was canceled without explanation.

A Hezb-e Islami spokesman told RFE/RL that Hekmatyar's appearance had been rescheduled for April 29.

Hekmatyar’s supporters have erected large billboards across Kabul in anticipation of his first public appearance.

Hekmatyar founded Hezb-e Islami in the mid-1970s. The group become one of the main mujahedin factions fighting against Soviet forces following their invasion in 1979, and then one of the most prominent groups in the bloody civil war for control of Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

Hekmatyar, a former prime minister under the mujahedin government, was one of the chief protagonists of the internecine 1992-96 war. Rights groups accuse Hekmatyar of responsibility for the shelling of residential areas of Kabul in the 1990s, as well as forced disappearances and covert jails where torture was commonplace.

He was designated as a terrorist by the U.S. State Department in 2003.

Under the peace agreement, Hekmatyar will be granted amnesty for past offenses and certain Hezb-e Islami prisoners will be released by the government. The deal also includes provisions for his security at government expense.

In February, the UN Security Council lifted sanctions on Hekmatyar, paving his way to return to Afghanistan.

The controversial peace deal was a breakthrough for Ghani, who so far has had little to show for his efforts at ending the country’s 16-year war.

While the military wing of the Hezb-e Islami led by Hekmatyar has been a largely dormant force in recent years and has little political relevance in Afghanistan, the deal with the government could be a template for any future deal with fundamentalist Taliban militants who have also fought Kabul's authority.