IPA CIS Council Secretariat summarized the progress of 2016 in a festive pre-New Year setting

In the run-up to the New Year, Secretary General of the IPA CIS Council Alexey Sergeev congratulated the Secretariat’s staff on behalf of Chairperson of the IPA CIS Council, Speaker of the Council of Federation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Valentina Matvienko, thanking everybody for their work in the past year 2016 and conveyed best wishes for the coming 2017.

Alexey Sergeev noted that, for the IPA CIS Council Secretariat, 2016 had been a successful, intensive and positive year. “The IPA CIS Council Secretariat has successfully fulfilled its primary function — model law-making: the CIS parliamentarians adopted 29 model laws. We also launched our new project — the Dialogue: Politics, Law, Economics magazine. This year we repeated our record of 2010 by forming eight teams of international observers at elections and referendums. We saw a major change in the international area of our activity: earlier this year the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly became an associate member of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the largest and the oldest parliamentary organization in the world. Only ten organizations had the same status before, we became the eleventh. In 2016 the IPA CIS reaffirmed its status of an efficient tool for strengthening the integration processes in the Commonwealth”, concluded Secretary General.