94. The next biennial renewal of the CPT’s membership is due to take place at the end of 2019, the terms of office of 23 members of the Committee expiring on 19 December of that year. In this respect, it should be noted that 12 of the 23 seats (i.e. more than 50%) are currently occupied by women, which means that the 2019 renewal of membership may pose a risk for the gender balance within the Committee. The CPT trusts that all the national delegations concerned in the Parliamentary Assembly will put forward lists of candidates in good time, so as to enable the Bureau of the Assembly to transmit the lists to the Committee of Ministers by the end of June 2019 at the latest. If the election procedure for all the seats can be completed before the end of 2019, this will greatly facilitate the planning of the CPT’s activities for the following year. 95. On 26 April, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted Resolution 2160 (2017) on “25 years of the CPT: achievements and areas for improvement” in which it congratulated the Committee for its outstanding work and called on national delegations inter alia to ensure that candidates put forward as potential members of the CPT possess the requisite skills and qualities (including language skills) and to improve national selection procedures. In an increasing number of countries, lists of candidates for vacant seats in the Committee are being drawn up in a manner that meets the requirements of this Resolution on improving selection procedures for CPT members. The Committee hopes that this will soon be the case in all countries. As the Parliamentary Assembly emphasised in its Resolution 1923 (2013) on reinforcing the selection processes for members of key Council of Europe human rights monitoring mechanisms, “at the national level, selection procedures must be transparent and open to competition, including through public calls for candidatures”. Indeed, this is the only way of ensuring that all persons placed on lists of candidates are capable of making an effective contribution to the CPT’s activities. In its Resolution 2160 (2017), the Parliamentary Assembly also calls on national delegations to ensure that the “candidates have an excellent command of at least one of the official languages of the Council of Europe (English or French), and at least a passive knowledge of the second official language”; and “in order to ensure the independence and impartiality of the CPT, bear in mind that a candidate holding a decision-making position which implies defining and/or implementing policies at national level or otherwise holding functions which may give rise to a conflict of interest, should in principle not be selected”. The CPT supports these criteria for the selection of members. Bureau of the CPT 96. Elections for the Bureau were held at the Committee’s March plenary meeting on the expiry of the previous Bureau’s two-year term of office. Mykola Gnatovskyy (Ukraine) was re-elected President, Marzena Ksel (Poland) was re-elected 1st VicePresident, and Mark Kelly (Ireland) was elected 2nd Vice-President. These three members of the CPT constitute the Committee’s Bureau. General Report of the CPT, 2017 ► Page 32