Since 2021, Despina is Secretary General of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The first woman to occupy this post since the Assembly's creation in 1949.
Her priorities for her mandate are focused on enhancing the impact of Assembly across member states by strengthening synergies with national parliaments, deepening relations with Permanent Representatives, working with other parts of the Organisation to maximise effectiveness, and modernising working methods within the Assembly, especially through the use of artificial intelligence.
Promoting women’s participation and women’s empowerment are a red thread running through all her priorities. Under her leadership, women’s representation in the Assembly is approaching parity for the first time in its history, in part thanks to procedural changes she has championed. Alongside these firm measures to drive change forward, she has worked on changing mindsets, initiating an informal Women@PACE group, which brings together all women in the Assembly. This group was the first to hear the voice of Ukrainian women MPs, describing the horror of the war only days after its outbreak.
One of her most cherished memories of her time in the Organisation is sitting next to Vigdis Finnbogadottir, from Iceland, the world's first elected female President, when the Prime Minister of Iceland and the President of the Assembly were signing in Reykjavik, on the eve of the fourth Summit, the new Vigdis Prize for Women’s Empowerment.
As the first female Secretary General of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Despina Chatzivassiliou-Tsovilis shares her pride in having contributed to empowering women in the Assembly and her best memory.
The project “75 women in 75 years of Council of Europe history” is organised by the Delegation of the European Union to the Council of Europe with the Council of Europe and the Permanent Representations of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
