Chair of the Milli Majlis Sahiba Gafarova who is visiting in the Republic of Kazakhstan currently took part in the meeting of the TurkPA Council of Assembly and delivered an introductory speech at it on 28 September.

Sahiba Gafarova, the acting chair of the TurkPA, recalled that the chairmanship of the Assembly had gone from the parliament of Turkey to the parliament of Azerbaijan at the 9^th plenary sitting held in Baku in 2019. Several steps had since been taken to make the operations of the TurkPA more effective and robust. And as for today, the Kazakh side are taking over the Assembly helming mission, according to Mrs Gafarova.

Then, the leader of the Azerbaijani parliament passed the chairmanship to the head of the Mazhilis of the Kazakhstan parliament Nurlan Nigmatulin and wished him success.

Telling of the work done during the Azerbaijani chairmanship of the TurkPA from December 2019 to September 2021, Mrs Gafarova touched on the 44-day Patriotic War of last year that Azerbaijan had won under the guidance of President, Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev. That war had culminated in the termination of the thirty-year-long Armenian occupation of Azerbaijan’s lands: our state had made its national territory whole again. A completely new geopolitical panorama emerged in the region consequently.

The leader of the Azerbaijani parliament praised the activities of the TurkPA at the time of the Second Garabagh War. The TurkPA Secretariat officials were visiting the far-from-frontline towns of Ganja, Barda and Terter and the other populated localities of Azerbaijan which Armenia had been attacking with ballistic missiles and cluster rounds. The information and photo footage of the true state of affairs there were sent to international organisations. Mrs Gafarova mentioned the TurkPA’s severe condemnation of Armenia’s acts of terror and war crimes against civilians; pertinent declarations were issued. The Assembly supported most unequivocally the conflict’s settlement on condition of the preservation of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and in the context of Azerbaijan’s sovereignty.

Presenting her report to the TurkPA colleagues further, Sahiba Gafarova told them that a number of functions set for the past period had to be put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic; for that, most of them – including the commission meetings – had gone online. Combatting the consequences of the pandemic jointly was discussed at a videoconference on the ways to make the economies stable again by way of regional co-operation. The perspective interaction within the Turkic co-operation organisations was talked over at the symposium ‘The Turkic World’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’. The significance of Azerbaijan’s great Victory in the Second Garabagh War for the whole Turkic World was underlined at the same gathering.

The commission meetings held in the expired period had paid special attention to aligning the national legislations of the TurkPA member-states subject to the Istanbul Treaty, Sahiba Gafarova told the Council of the Assembly members. Of the six model draft laws prepared to date, five come from the parliament of Azerbaijan and one from the parliament of Turkey, the rapporteur mentioned before calling on all the TurkPA parliaments to engage in this process actively.

The parliament of Azerbaijan has also held in its sight the institutional advancement of the Assembly: our state has been discussing the current condition of the Assembly’s legal foundations and the ways to improve its legal documents throughput the chairmanship spell. The regulations of the groups of Women Parliamentarians and of Young Parliamentarians as well as the Model Law Regulations were drafted with the progress discussed at commission meetings; the drafts were tabled at a plenary sitting subsequently. In addition, the international co-operative connexions of the TurkPA had broadened substantially during the chairmanship of Azerbaijan’s Milli Majlis.

Sahiba Gafarova then expressed a confidence that the TurkPA would become larger and new full members would be joining it in the nearest future.

The presentation by the chair of the Milli Majlis was followed by the other items on the Council’s meeting agenda. Draft legal documents and model laws of the TurkPA, election and referendum accounts, organisational matters, next-year work plans, the plenary sitting agenda and other documents were duly approved.

With that, the meeting of the TurkPA Council of the Assembly was over.

The Press and Public Relations Department

The Milli Majlis