Council of Europe

• 1. Introduction

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  The Council of Europe was signed into existence on the 5th of May 1949, by ten nations meeting in London - and yet most people today have never heard of it. They know the European Union. They may know the European Court of Human Rights. They might even recognise the circle of twelve golden stars on a blue background. What they may not realise is that all three of those things trace their origins to a single organisation, founded in the rubble of post-war Europe, that has been quietly shaping the continent ever since.

  With 46 member states and an annual ordinary budget of 656 million euros, the Council of Europe is Europe's oldest intergovernmental organisation. Its court in Strasbourg issues rulings that are binding on all 46 of those nations. The European flag was designed for this organisation in 1955, years before the European Union adopted it. And the European anthem, drawn from Beethoven's ninth symphony, belongs here first too.

  What drove people to build this institution in 1949? What power does it actually hold, and what are its limits? Why did one country become the first ever expelled from its ranks? And how did a scandal involving luxury caviar and allegations of millions in bribes shake the organisation to its foundations?

• 2. The Idea Takes Shape

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  Aristide Briand, the French Foreign Minister, floated the idea in 1929: a "federal union" of European nations that could resolve the continent's common problems together. His vision found no traction then. It took a world war to make people listen.

  On the 21st of March 1943, while the Second World War was still raging, Winston Churchill used a BBC radio broadcast to publicly call for a "Council of Europe". He tried, in his own words, to "peer through the mists of the future to the end of the war" and think about how a shattered continent could be rebuilt. He called such an undertaking "a stupendous business".

  Churchill returned to the theme in a well-known speech at the University of Zurich on the 19th of September 1946, throwing the full weight of his considerable post-war prestige behind the idea. There, he reached for the resonant phrase "United States of Europe" to describe what he envisioned.

  Across the continent, politicians and statesmen were quietly working toward the same goal, many of them through the European Movement. Some saw the council as a guarantee against the horrors of Nazi-era human rights violations. Others viewed it as a "club of democracies" that could stand as a bulwark against the Eastern Bloc's totalitarian states.

  In 1948, several hundred leading politicians, government representatives, and civil society members met at the Congress of Europe in The Hague, Netherlands, to debate what form this organisation would actually take. Two competing visions emerged: one school favoured a classical intergovernmental body in which governments held the seats; the other wanted a political forum where elected parliamentarians could speak. Both sides eventually won. The solution was a dual structure, a Committee of Ministers representing governments alongside a Consultative Assembly representing parliaments. That model was later copied for the European Communities, NATO, and the OSCE.

• 3. The Founding Moment

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  On the 5th of May 1949, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom signed the Treaty of London, the founding Statute that established three core values: democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Greece and Turkey joined three months later.

  That August, one hundred members of the Consultative Assembly, parliamentarians drawn from the twelve member nations, met in Strasbourg for the body's first plenary session. They met over 18 sittings, the session lasting nearly a month. On the agenda: how to reconcile and reconstruct a continent still reeling from war, while already facing a new East-West divide. One of the most radical ideas they debated was the creation of a transnational court to protect the basic human rights of every citizen.

  Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgium's foreign minister, resigned his cabinet post in August 1949 to be elected as the first president of the assembly. Behind the scenes he had been one of the architects of the council's creation and played a central role in steering its earliest work. But in December 1951, after nearly three years in the role, he resigned in disappointment when the Assembly rejected proposals for a "European political authority". Convinced that the Council of Europe would never achieve his long-term goal of a unified Europe, he turned his energies toward economic integration, eventually becoming one of the founders of the European Union.

  One of the council's first concrete acts was to admit West Germany on the 2nd of May 1951, setting a pattern of post-war reconciliation that would define the organisation's character for decades to come.

• 4. The Convention and the Court

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  The drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights was among the most ambitious undertakings of the council's early years. Adopted in 1950 following a report by the Parliamentary Assembly, it drew in part on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which had been signed in Paris only months earlier.

  The crucial difference between the two documents was enforcement. The Universal Declaration was essentially aspirational; the European Convention built in an international court to adjudicate alleged violations and hold governments to account. The British MP Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe served as rapporteur for the drafting process, shaping the text that would become the foundation of European human rights law.

  Today, that court, the European Court of Human Rights, sits in Strasbourg and issues rulings that are binding on all 46 member nations. Under Protocol No. 14 to the Convention, the court's case-processing procedures were reformed and streamlined. Russia delayed ratification of that protocol for a number of years before it finally passed in January 2010.

  Among the lesser-known contributions of the Parliamentary Assembly was the work of Dick Marty, whose reports on secret CIA detentions and rendition flights in Europe became widely known in 2006 and 2007. Other Assembly reports played a role in the abolition of the death penalty in Europe, in highlighting the political and human rights situation in Chechnya, and in identifying who was responsible for disappeared persons in Belarus.

• 5. Expansion and Belonging

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  Membership of the Council of Europe grew slowly in its early decades. Iceland had already joined in 1950. Austria joined in 1956, Cyprus in 1961, Switzerland in 1963, and Malta in 1965. Portugal joined in 1976, and Spain in 1977, two years after the death of its dictator Francisco Franco, as part of the Spanish transition to democracy.

  The fall of Communism in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the organisation's scale and ambitions. Country after country from the former Eastern Bloc applied and was admitted. Hungary joined in 1990, Poland in 1991, Bulgaria in 1992. Russia itself joined in 1996.

  The article in the founding Statute that governs eligibility is deliberately broad. Article 3 requires accepting the principles of the rule of law and committing to human rights and fundamental freedoms. Article 4 specifies that membership is open to any "European" state, but the Statute leaves the word "European" undefined. Turkey was admitted in 1950, even though the country lies mostly in Asia. In 1994, the Parliamentary Assembly adopted Recommendation 1247 stating that admission should in principle be open only to states whose national territory lies "wholly or partly" in Europe; even so, the Assembly later extended eligibility to Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

  Observer status was created for non-European countries that accept the organisation's democratic values and wish to take part in its work. The United States became an observer state in 1995. Canada, the Holy See, Japan, and Mexico also hold observer status today.

• 6. Russia's Expulsion

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  Russia joined the Council of Europe in 1996. The relationship was never easy, and it ended with a historic first: Russia became the only country ever expelled from the organisation.

  After Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, the Council stripped Russia of its voting rights in the Parliamentary Assembly. Russia responded by boycotting the Assembly from 2016 and, from 2017, stopped paying its annual membership dues of 32.6 million euros, which placed the institution under real financial strain.

  In June 2019, an approximately two-thirds majority of the Council voted, on a 118-62 vote with 10 abstentions, to restore Russia's voting rights. Supporters of restoration included France and Germany, which argued that without Russian membership, Russian citizens would lose their ability to bring cases to the European Court of Human Rights. Opponents, including Ukraine and the Baltic states, argued that restoring the rights amounted to normalising Russian conduct.

  On the 3rd of March 2022, days after Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, the council suspended Russia for violations of its Statute and of the European Convention on Human Rights. On the 15th of March 2022, hours before a vote to expel the country, Russia initiated a voluntary withdrawal procedure. The Russian delegation planned to deliver its formal withdrawal on the 31st of December 2022. But on that same day, the Committee of Ministers decided to terminate Russia's membership immediately, ruling that Russia had been excluded under the expulsion mechanism rather than through the voluntary withdrawal. After exclusion, Russia's former president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev endorsed restoring the death penalty in Russia.

• 7. The Caviar Diplomacy Scandal

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  Azerbaijan joined the Council of Europe in 2001, and almost immediately questions arose about whether the organisation was holding it accountable. Human Rights Watch criticised the Council in 2014 for allowing Azerbaijan to assume the six-month rotating chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers despite the Azerbaijani government's repression of human rights defenders, dissidents, and journalists.

  In 2017, amid allegations of bribery by Azerbaijani government officials and mounting criticism of what became known as "caviar diplomacy", the council set up an internal inquiry. The investigation ran for ten months and produced a 219-page report in 2018. The report concluded that several members of the Parliamentary Assembly had broken the organisation's ethical rules and were "strongly suspected" of corruption.

  The inquiry heavily criticised former Parliamentary Assembly president Pedro Agramunt, suggesting he had engaged in "corruptive activities" before resigning under pressure in 2017. It also named Italian member Luca Volonte as a suspect in "activities of a corruptive nature". Italian prosecutors accused Volonte in 2017 of receiving over 2.39 million euros in bribes in exchange for working on behalf of Azerbaijan within the Parliamentary Assembly, including playing a key role in 2013 in orchestrating the defeat of a highly critical report on the abuse of political prisoners in Azerbaijan. In 2021, Volonte was convicted of accepting bribes from Azerbaijani officials, and a court in Milan sentenced him to four years in prison.

• 8. Symbols and Reach

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  The Council of Europe created the European Flag in 1955, twelve golden stars arranged in a circle on a blue background. The European Union adopted the same flag in the 1980s. To reduce confusion, the Council of Europe often uses a modified version with a lower-case "e" surrounding the stars, referred to as the "Council of Europe Logo".

  The musical anthem, the "European anthem", draws on the "Ode to Joy" theme from Ludwig van Beethoven's ninth symphony and has served as the council's anthem since 1972. On the 5th of May 1964, the 15th anniversary of the organisation's founding, the Council established that date as Europe Day.

  The council's seat is in Strasbourg, France, where the first meetings were held in the city's University Palace in 1949. The organisation has since built eight main buildings in the Quartier europeen, spread across three districts in the northeast of the city. The Agora building, opened in 2008, was named the best international business centre real estate project of 2007 at the MIPIM 2008 ceremony on the 13th of March 2008.

  Beyond Strasbourg, the Council maintains a wide physical presence. Its Development Bank is in Paris. The North-South Centre is in Lisbon, Portugal. The Centre for Modern Languages operates in Graz, Austria. European Youth Centres operate in both Strasbourg and Budapest, Hungary. Programme Offices run in Ankara, Podgorica, Skopje, and Venice. In 2018, an archive called "Voices of Europe" went online, cataloguing 263 speeches delivered to the Parliamentary Assembly over a 70-year period by some 216 presidents, prime ministers, monarchs, and religious leaders from 45 countries, the fruit of a two-year project that continues to expand.