Lord Judd calls for Political Settlement in Chechnya
October 21, 2002, 3:18 p.m. EDT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Chris Swift, Tel. (202) 296-5101 x134

Lord Judd, the Chechnya Rapporteur for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), today called for a political settlement to the war in Chechnya. He underscored the importance of political dialogue between the warring parties.

"If a solution is to be effective it must have many stakeholders, including those groups without whom settlement is impossible," Mr. Judd said in remarks at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

In his remarks, Lord Judd also called on U.S. and European policymakers to elevate the importance of ending the war in their discussions with Russian officials.

"We need to make Chechnya more prominent in our exchanges with Russia, as this issue is very significant in our global coalition on terrorism," he said. "Failure to match our rhetoric on human rights with action on the ground will only play into the hands of extremists."

In September, Lord Judd led a fact-finding mission to Chechnya to assess humanitarian conditions in the war-torn region and monitor Russian efforts to curb widespread human rights abuses. A copy of the report may be found at the Council of Europe website.

The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya hosted Lord Judd. While in Washington, he met with scholars, journalists and senior White House and State Department officials.

Founded in 1999, the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC) is a bipartisan coalition of distinguished Americans dedicated to promoting a peaceful end to the war in Chechnya. It is based at the Washington, DC offices of Freedom House.