Dobroe utro,

Dobroi rannitsy,

• I am honoured to close this conference, which is part of our common efforts to strengthen Belarus - Council of Europe relations. It is not my ambition to summarise the many informative contributions that have been presented today and yesterday. I would rather like to share a few general observations with you, pursuing some of the themes that my colleague Andrei Metelitsa has just mentioned.

• Three years ago, in September 2015, I opened a similar conference. Already then, your country had an impressive record. Belarus is party to 10 Council of Europe treaties, including key conventions on corruption, trafficking in human beings, anti-doping, recognition of qualifications concerning higher education (Bologna process).

• Your Parliament has just ratified the Additional Protocol to the Anti-Doping Convention and we look forward to the deposit of the instrument of ratification in Strasbourg.

• Belarus also participates as a full member in important monitoring mechanisms such as GRECO - the ‘Group of States against Corruption’ and GRETA - the ‘Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings’ as well as in the partial agreement on sport EPAS. Your experts also attend several important intergovernmental committees as observers, such as the Steering Committee for Human Rights (CDDH) or the Committee of Legal Advisers on Public International Law (CAHDI). Belarus is in indeed the only non-member state who has signed the Declaration  on Jurisdictional Immunities of State Owned Cultural Property prepared within CAHDI (on 14 September 2015).

• We hope that the amendments to the law on international treaties of the Republic of Belarus currently being debated in your Parliament will facilitate the ratification of even more Council of Europe treaties.

• Treaties must of course not only be ratified, but also properly implemented. I am confident that Belarus will rapidly follow up on the conclusions of GRECO - the ‘Group of States against Corruption’ - and bring the Belarusian Criminal Code fully in line with the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption.

• The Council of Europe stands ready to assist Belarus’ efforts to accede to more of our conventions. I am particularly happy that the Action Plan for your country which initially covered the biennium 2016-17 will be extended. This is not a purely technical, but a political decision, bearing witness of the intention to integrate your country even more into our common European legal space.

• In that context, we particularly welcome your willingness to engage in a constructive dialogue on the abolition of the death penalty with the active involvement of your citizens. Having made Council of Europe member states a death penalty free zone is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of our Organisation. The continued application of the death penalty is also a major obstacle to Belarus’s participation in our criminal law conventions.

• Our cooperation brings Belarus and Belarusians closer to the European democratic family while also permitting Europeans - like myself - to discover your beautiful country.

• Your country is not an ordinary non-member state, but a country at the heart of Europe. As our Committee of Ministers reiterated recently, “the integration of Belarus into the Council of Europe on the basis of the Organisation’s values” continues to be a “strategic objective.”

• I told you in the beginning that this is the second time that I have participated in a conference about treaty law in your country. Allow me to therefore conclude with a quote from the Banquet Speech of your laureate of the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature, Svetlana Alexievich:

• “Другi раз чалавек аглядваецца не па чужынцы, а ўжо з серцам ...” (“When a person looks a second time, it is not with the eye of a stranger, it is a look with the heart ....”).

• Thank you for your attention.