Three parliamentary coalition factions of Armenia threaten to freeze their participation at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), meeting this week in Strasbourg, unless the newly-elected Turkish Chairman of PACE Mevlut Cavusoglu stops expressing “biased” opinions.

This protest (followed by a phone call from NA Speaker Hovik Abrahamyan to Cavusoglu) occurred soon after the PACE chairman’s interview with Azeri-Press Agency (APA) about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, where he mentioned that “it is fixed in PACE documents that Nagorno-Karabakh is within the territory of Azerbaijan, and that it is an Azeri land; there is also the fact of occupation of Azeri lands.” Cavusoglu also expressed the view that the existence of the unsettled Nagorno-Karabakh conflict seriously hinders the normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia.

The coalition members of the delegation consider this interview to be “biased” and they insist that Cavusoglu’s comments on the issue “call in question his ability to be biased concerning the perception of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.”

On January 28, NA Speaker Abrahamyan had a telephone conversation with Cavusoglu to clarify the issue. Abrahamyan appealed to Cavusoglu to “have a sensitive, sensible and steady position related to regional issues during his two-year PACE chairmanship.”

But Cavusoglu told the NA speaker that in the press report contained statements ascribed to him, which, he, in fact, did not make.

“These statements are the results of poor translation and the Azeri journalist’s misunderstanding,” Cavusoglu said.

Meanwhile, oppositionist Heritage Party (member of PACE Armenian delegation) is angry not with Cavusoglu’s interview but rather with the “improvident behavior” of the Armenian delegates.

According to Heritage, “the patriotic outburst of the coalition factions is late and irrelevant.”

“When we were organizing a signature collection against the election of the Turkish chairman, the coalition representatives of the Armenian delegation refused signing this initiative, and only now they are awaken,” says Zaruhi Postanjyan, member of PACE Armenian delegation.