CSTO parliamentarians had a meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia

Parliamentarians of the Collective Security Treaty Organization Member States met with Paruyr Hovhannisyan, deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia.
Paruyr Hovhannisyan briefed the representatives of the Standing Commission of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization on the problems caused by the escalation of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2022 and the assessment of the CSTO mission and the results of the extraordinary session of the CSTO Collective Security Council.
In turn, Dmitry Novikov, deputy Chairman of the CSTO PA Standing Commission on Political Affairs and International Cooperation and deputy Chairman of the Committee on International Affairs of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, expressed his deep gratitude to Paruyr Hovhannisyan for the high level of preparation and conduct of the field session of the CSTO PA Standing Commission on Political Affairs and International Cooperation. He also recalled that the CSTO PA is a tool of parliamentary diplomacy and that the session participants considered their role through that lens.
Referring to the matters brought before the Standing Commission, he noted that some of them have been considered for some time, including the improvement of the legislative framework, in particular, the issue of sending observers to monitor electoral processes.
“Experience of this kind is being accumulated not only during the observation of electoral processes in the CSTO Member States, but also outside the CSTO area of responsibility,” stressed Dmitry Novikov, mentioning the participation of international observers from the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly in the monitoring of the presidential and parliamentary elections in the Republic of Serbia.
“A number of countries expressed their interest in having us monitor their elections in this way; there is a need to work out approaches on how widely it will be practiced,” said Dmitry Novikov.
He emphasized that the parliamentarians representing the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia working in the CSTO PA Standing Commission on Political Affairs and International Cooperation “have fully used this platform today to inform their colleagues from other parliaments about their positions, their viewpoint and the situation,” which, according to Dmitry Novikov, has been done fairly comprehensively.