MINISTERS’ DEPUTIES

CM Documents

CM/AS(2022)9

…October 2022

Communication on the activities of the Committee of Ministers Address by Mr Thomas Byrne, Minister of State for European Affairs of Ireland, representing the Chair of the Committee of Ministers (Strasbourg, 12 October 2022)

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A Uachtaráin, Monsieur le Président,

A Chomhaltaí den Tionól Parlaiminteach, Members of the Parliamentary Assembly,

A Chairde, Dear friends,

C'est un plaisir d'être à nouveau ici à Strasbourg, au siège des droits de l'homme européens, le Conseil de l'Europe, suite à ma visite au Comité des Ministres en juin. (It is a pleasure to be here again in Strasbourg, at the seat of European human rights, the Council of Europe, following my visit to the Committee of Ministers in June.)

Three weeks ago, the Russian Federation ceased to be a party to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Three years ago, a young Russian man reminded us of why those rights matter so very much.

In August 2019, Russian authorities arrested 21-year old blogger Yegor Zhukov.

What was his alleged crime?

It was to have ‘‘incited extremism against the State’’ by reporting on rallies across Russia that summer, protesting blatant electoral fraud.

Facing sentencing, the judge afforded Mr Zhukov a last chance to address the court.

The young man rose. And if you don't mind, I'll quote a section of his remarks:

‘‘Common action’’, he observed ‘‘… is a rarity in a country where few people feel responsible. And where common action does occur, the guardians of the State immediately see it as a threat. It doesn’t matter what you do – whether you are helping prison inmates, speaking up for human rights, fighting for the environment – sooner or later you’ll either be branded a ‘foreign agent’ or just locked up. The state’s message is clear: ‘Go back to your burrow and don’t take part in common action’…. Where can trust come from in a country like this—and where can love grow?’’

Mr Zhukov’s testimony captures eloquently what rights really are.

What civil society, media freedom, judicial independence – too often they are abstract terms – but we see what they mean concretely.

And why this mission in this Assembly – promoting democracy, human rights, and the rule of law across the continent – matters so profoundly.

It’s a mission the Committee of Ministers shares.

Ireland assumed the Presidency five months ago, at a time of profound crisis for our continent and challenge for this Council.

Grave moments, we believe, must be matched by great ambition.

And our aspirations have reflected that.

During our Presidency, we have set out to renew what we consider ‘‘the conscience of Europe’’.

Refocusing the Council’s efforts, in the wake of Russia’s expulsion, on the institution’s core values and ensuring the most effective possible support for Ukraine and its people.

In voting, unanimously, last March to recommend Russia’s expulsion from the Council, this Assembly responded resolutely to this unjustified and unjustifiable invasion.

You acted as ‘‘the conscience of Europe’’ should.

Our task since then has been to show the same conviction, the same conscience, the same urgency in supporting Ukraine.

And in holding Russia to account.

Internationally, I'm proud that Ireland has been to the forefront of these efforts.

In New York, as an elected member of the UN Security Council, we have consistently condemned Russian aggression, denouncing the invasion as illegal, unjustified, and unprovoked.

In Geneva, we pressed the Human Rights Council to appoint an independent international commission of inquiry into violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.

And then in The Hague, we joined 38 other States in referring the invasion to the International Criminal Court, enabling Prosecutor Khan to advance his critical investigations.

And here in Strasbourg, through our Presidency, we’ve worked with your President Mr Tiny Kox, Secretary General Ms Marija Pejčinović Burić, and others to ensure that the Council’s expertise is channelled as effectively as possible towards supporting Ukraine.

In that context, we’ve backed the agreement of the Council’s new adjusted Ukraine Action Plan.

In July, Ireland helped to fast-track Ukraine’s accession to the Council of Europe’s Development Bank, establishing a new Donor Fund there to help those displaced by the war, and enabling the Bank to play a key role in rebuilding Ukraine’s shattered social infrastructure.

And last month, for the first time in our history, we joined more than twenty other member states in intervening as a third party before the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Ukraine and the Russian Federation.

While ahead of High Level Week at the UN, our Presidency led the Committee of Ministers in reaffirming the urgent need for an unequivocal international legal response to the crime of aggression against Ukraine.

Clearly, we must hold the authorities, both in Moscow and in Minsk, to account.

But it’s vital also to strengthen support to those in both countries who, like young Yegor Zhukov, those who seek to defend human rights and promote democracy.

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a friend of Ireland from her teenage years and indeed a friend of mine, addressed this Assembly in June.

At our Presidency’s invitation, she returned to Strasbourg in July to speak to the Committee of Ministers. There, she called for “more Council of Europe in Belarus, and more Belarus in the Council of Europe.”

Last month, I am pleased to say, the Committee of Ministers agreed to do just that.

So, committing to holding regular exchanges with Ms Tsikhanouskaya and inviting Secretary General Pejčinović Burić to establish a “contact group” to engage with representatives of Belarusian democratic forces and civil society.

I commend this initiative. And I hope that, before long, we can do the same with Russian democratic activists.

So, much has been done, but be in no doubt that much more is needed.

And within this Council, within this Parliamentary Assembly, more is possible.

So, it is to that end that, since assuming the Presidency, that Ireland has called for the Heads of Government of the 46 member States to convene for only the fourth time in the history of this organisation.

To reaffirm our shared conviction in the rule of law.

To recommit to the human rights that are established in our Convention.

To answer autocracy with the word "democracy".

A summit will not be held during the Irish Presidency, but I add my voice again to those urging it to be agreed as soon as possible.

And it should be convened in the incoming Icelandic Presidency.

I ask all of you in the chamber to join me in that – and to call on your governments to do the same.

Let Reykjavik be the place to reaffirm Europeans’ rights and to renew our democracies.

And let this be the time.

Because if not now, when?

And if not us, who?

As to what the substance of a summit should be, the High-Level Reflection Group that the President mentioned, chaired by Ireland’s former President, Mary Robinson, has devoted the past four months to considering that very subject.

Distilling submissions from this Assembly, the Court and many others, the group presented its final report only last week.

And I commend and thank them for their efforts.

And I urge all of us here today - across all of our capitals - to reflect on the wise and balanced set of recommendations they have put forward to adapt this Council to reflect today’s realities.

I know, too, that the Assembly has convened an ad-hoc committee to reflect on the case for a renewed and reinforced Council of Europe.

And I am thankful that my brilliant friend, Senator Fiona O'Loughlin, head of our national delegation, is serving as rapporteur to this committee.

And I know that she will soon present what is sure to be a similarly impressive report.

Read together though, these two reports will present a blueprint for institutional renewal.

They may be ambitious. But now is the time for that ambition.

At the heart of the High-Level Reflection Group’s report, and at the core of Ireland’s Presidency, is a recommitment to this institution’s "Founding Freedoms", what we are about.

Above all else, this means we are focussing on human rights protection for civilians across Europe, not least through the European Court of Human Rights.

Yesterday, I had the honour of joining my President Higgins as he called on the Court to meet President Spano and Judge Síofra O’Leary, who will next month take office as the Court’s President.

She will be the first Irish citizen to do so. And the first woman, even more significantly.

Her appointment is a great credit to her expertise and her experience and a reflection of her standing here in Strasbourg and indeed within the international legal community too.

It’s also a source of great pride to all in Ireland.

Because Ireland actually really understands the Court. And the Court is an institution that the Irish people would be familiar with. As the brave organisers of Europride in Belgrade affirmed to the world last month: LGBTI rights are human rights.

Last week, Slovenia made history as the first eastern European State to establish marriage equality – and I want to thank them for that.

In 2015, the people of Ireland voted in a referendum overwhelmingly for the same right.

But the path to that referendum was laid down in the courtrooms here in Strasbourg in 1988.

Senator David Norris, a champion of civil rights, won a case against Ireland that lead to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts.

It was a testament to the Senator’s own bravery, but also to the vital importance of the Court in protecting individual rights.

And indeed, Senator Norris was represented by former president Mary Robinson during that case as well. And it shows the wisdom of States implementing Court’s judgments, however challenging they might have seemed. And they certainly seemed challenging in that era in Ireland at the time.

But the Court ruling was not ignored. Because a Court ruling ignored is not only a human right infringed, but it is also societal progress delayed.

So, inspired by Senator David Norris’s example, and by the change our society has since enjoyed, Ireland has made protecting LGBTI rights a priority for our Presidency.

In June, we invited leading LGBTI+ activists to address the Committee of Ministers for the first time. And later this month, in Dublin, we’ll host a European roundtable on combatting LGBTI hate crime across Europe.

Above all, we’ve set out to counter the false pretext that some States advance that, by denying individual rights, they’re somehow defending traditional values.

In reality, they are promoting fear – I believe – rather than protecting families.

No value is more traditional than welcome.

And what does family entail if not love?

And that is what the people of Ireland voted for in 2015. And what Slovenia embraced last week. And what – I believe – this Council represents.

Along similar lines, our Presidency has focussed on what the High-Level Reflection Group rightly identify as one of the most egregious and persistent violations of human rights on this continent – the scourge of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence.

Two weeks ago, in Dublin, our Justice Minister Helen McEntee led 38 States in signing up to a declaration recommitting to the Istanbul Convention and bolstering our collective efforts to strengthen legal standards in the area of gender equality and violence against women.

As the conference title suggests, there can be ‘‘no safe haven’’ for those perpetrating violence against women or justifying it under false pretexts.

Freedom of expression is integral to documenting such abuses – whether by individuals or indeed by States.

Without a free press, there can be no freedom.

But too often, the price is steep.

To record Ukraine’s resistance and document Russia’s tyranny in these recent months, Europe’s journalists have risked their lives.

Many have lost them, including an Irish journalist.

He was Pierre Zakrzewski. He was born in Paris, he was raised in Dublin. Pierre died in the village of Horenka, outside Kyiv, on 14 March, after Russian artillery rained down upon his press vehicle.

Pierre was buried in Ireland.

But his legacy is that knowledge of the crimes perpetrated in Ukraine will be forever with us.

We owe it to him – to all those journalists risking their lives today in Ukraine and elsewhere – not to let that knowledge fester into anger. But turn it, as Pierre did, to purposeful action.

It was with this in mind that two weeks ago Ireland convened a special meeting of the Committee of Ministers on media freedom and the safety of journalists.

And that last month, I joined President Tiny Kox, Secretary General Pejčinović Burić, and others in addressing a Presidency conference, arranged with the Venice Commission, on New Challenges to the Freedom of Association.

A Chairde, Dear friends,

In protecting these and other fundamental freedoms, the European Convention on Human Rights is our North Star. And the Court is our compass. It shows us the way.

And the implementation of that way, of the Court’s judgments, is not simply a legal requirement. It is a moral imperative.

That’s why the Committee of Ministers treats this so seriously – as you do here in PACE – and you treat seriously the issue of Türkiye’s continuing failure, as a Party to the Convention, to implement the judgment of the Court and release Mr Osman Kavala.

I raised the case with the Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Kaymakcı in August, and my colleague, Minister Coveney, did the same when he met Foreign Minister of Türkiye in New York two weeks ago.

The Committee of Ministers continues to monitor the case very closely.

And, following the Presidency’s exchanges with the Turkish government last week, discussions took place to appoint a contact group, comprising Permanent Representatives, to visit Ankara to impress upon Turkish authorities how vital it is to comply with the Court’s ruling. It's really, really important.

More generally, as the High-Level Reflection Group has urged, we must do more to ensure the freedoms that the Convention enshrines are fully afforded to our citizens, and all of them.

It’s for that reason that Ireland supports very strongly the group’s call for the European Union’s accession to the Convention to be finished and completed as soon as possible.

To that end that, in September, our Presidency supported two conferences at the University of Galway, on our western shores.

The first was called "Lighting the Shade", and focussed on how, collectively, we can better protect human rights in areas of conflict and contestation across the continent.

The second, was titled ‘Irish Travellers / Mincéirs and the State’, and this reflected on the distance – and the President mentioned this yesterday – that we in Ireland still have to travel in protecting our traveller community and enabling their full participation in Irish society.

In safeguarding rights, we recognise in Ireland that we’ve more to do at home. And also across this wide continent.

As the High-Level Reflection Group records, we’ve more to do also – much more - in countering democratic decline.

Because the risks are real. The playbook familiar.

Across this continent, we’ve seen how readily power can be consolidated and how a free media can be discredited. How judicial independence can be eroded. And civil society curtailed.

With disastrous results.

These days, we see this far too often.

Democracy is a most precious metal, but it can tarnish easily, if left unpolished. And can corrode over time.

As parliamentarians, we must renew our efforts to restore its shine.

Building a strong culture of democracy is key to defending it.

Working with the Secretariat across a series of conferences and seminars, Ireland’s Presidency has pressed to promote participatory democracy; to strengthen youth engagement in the democratic process; and above all to reinforce the value of civic education across our schools and universities.

The final events of our Presidency term, like the first, will focus on democratic engagement.

On 3 November, we host a Congress on Global Education in Dublin, where States will agree a new European Declaration, committing to investment in Education for Sustainable Development, Global Citizenship, and Human Rights.

Four days later, Minister Coveney will join the Prime Minister of Iceland here in Strasbourg to deliver a keynote address to the World Forum for Democracy, where we will profile Ireland’s positive experience of Citizens’ Assemblies, which have been really transformative.

But we have to do more.

If we’re to reverse democratic decline, our efforts must be untiring, and it was President Kennedy who called us to untiring effort in the defence of democracy.

Last week, our Taoiseach – our Prime Minister – joined the leaders of all but two of the 46 States that comprise this Council in Prague to discuss energy, environment, economic and security policy in the framework of the new and welcome European Political Community.

Now, that initiative was welcome, discussions were really necessary, and we felt they achieved a lot.

But I think we need to be clear.

Without democratic security, there is no real security.

Without the rule of law, there is no economic progress.

Without human rights, there is no environmental renewal.

And in these critical areas, the European Political Community was not established in Prague last week, but has existed here in Strasbourg since 1949.

And it is here, in this very chamber!

And we must use it.

The tasks of the Committee of Ministers are many and I cannot speak to all of them this morning.

But there is one issue that we, as chair, are devoting much time and care and effort.

Shortly before we took the Presidency, Kosovo* applied for membership of this Council.

Now, as chair, we sought to be balanced and impartial in affording the Committee of Ministers time and space to review the application.

Over the summer, we sought and received detailed guidance from the Secretariat on the legal questions surrounding the application.

On 14 September, we held a valuable exchange of views with Miroslav Lajčák, the EU Special Representative for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue.

And later this month, we will hear Commissioner Mijatović’s report on her recent visit to Kosovo*.

We’ve engaged extensively with members of the Committee of Ministers, and will continue to, recognising the importance of the issue for all concerned.

When Judge O’Leary assumes the Presidency of the Court next month, she will join Secretary General Pejčinović Burić and Commissioner Mijatović in leading this Council.

How much stronger this institution is for having such brilliant and inspiring women across its three offices.

But on 8 September, the world lost another inspiring female leader.

In Ireland, we have a tradition of the month’s mind – where we gather, a month after a person dies, to remember them together.

So let me end this morning by remembering Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and her historic State visit to Ireland in 2011.

In Dublin Castle, where our State secured its independence from Britain a century ago, the Queen addressed guests as I have addressed you all today, in Irish – "A Chairde", "Dear Friends".

She spoke, with profound honesty and eloquence, of the relationship between our islands.

She observed that her visit reminded us, and I quote, of the ‘‘complexity of our history, its many layers and traditions, but also the importance of forbearance and conciliation, of being able to bow to the past but not be bound by it.’’

As all here know, and as the Queen remarked in Dublin that day, the Good Friday Agreement, brokered by the British and Irish Governments, and underpinned by the European Convention on Human Rights, saw a ‘‘knot of history… painstakingly loosened’’ on the island of Ireland.

It is a legacy, I know, that the Parliamentarians of this Assembly are determined to protect.

And I am grateful for your efforts.

But the Queen’s remarks that evening in Dublin Castle are a reminder also of the possibility of reconciliation, even in the darkest times.

And of what her Majesty described as ‘‘The lessons from the peace process… [that] whatever life throws at us, our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.’’

The load that this Council bears – protecting democracy, human rights, and rule of law across this wide continent – is indeed a heavy load.

But that load is always lightened by collective efforts.

In the months ahead – as we work to pursue peace, ensure accountability, and reaffirm Europe’s conscience – let PACE, let the Committee of Ministers, let the Court, let the Congress, let all of the Council’s institutions and brilliant minds work together, alongside the EU, UN, and other partners – to share the load.

We need to loosen the knots of history. We need to light the path ahead.

We know that, in so doing, together, we can restore trust and renew democracy.

We can rebuild societies within which, as Yegor Zhukov had it, where common action can flourish.

And let that love grow.

Go raibh maith agaibh.

Thank you very much. Merci.