Treaty of London 1949 - Statute of the Council of Europe

 The Treaty of London was signed on May 5, 1949, which created the Council of Europe.

 Treaty of London 1949 - Statute of the Council of Europe

The Governments of the Kingdom of Belgium, the Kingdom of Denmark, the French Republic, the Irish Republic, the Italian Republic, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Kingdom of the Neth­erlands, the Kingdom of Norway, the Kingdom of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and North­ern Ireland,

                   Convinced that the pursuit of peace based upon justice and international co‑operation is vital for the pres­ervation of human society and civilisation;

                   Reaffirming their devotion to the spiritu­al and moral values which are the common heritage of their peoples and the true source of indi­vidual freedom, political liberty and the rule of law, princi­ples which form the basis of all genuine democracy;

                   Believing that, for the maintenance and further realisation of these ideals and in the interests of economic and social prog­ress, there is a need of a closer unity between all like‑minded countries of Europe;

                   Consid­ering that, to respond to this need and to the ex­pressed aspirations of their peoples in this regard, it is neces­sary forthwith to create an organisation which will bring European States into closer associa­tion,

                   Have in consequence decided to set up a Council of Europe consisting of a commit­tee of repre­sentatives of governments and of a consultative assembly, and have for this purpose adopted the following Statute.

Chapter I – Aim of the Council of Europe

                   Article 1

          a        The aim of the Council of Europe is to achieve a great­er unity between its members for the purpose of safe­guarding and reali­sing the ideals and principles which are their common heritage and facilitating their economic and social progress.

          b        This aim shall be pursued through the organs of the Coun­cil by discussion of questions of common concern and by agree­ments and common action in economic, social, cultural, scientific, legal and administra­tive matters and in the main­tenance and fur­ther realisation of human rights and fundamen­tal freedoms.

          c        Participation in the Council of Europe shall not affect the collabora­tion of its members in the work of the United Nations and of other international organisations or unions to which they are parties.

          d       Matters relating to national defence do not fall within the scope of the Council of Europe.

2

Chapter II – Membership

                   Article 2

                   The members of the Council of Europe are the Parties to this Statute.

                   Article 3

                   Every member of the Council of Europe must accept the princi­ples of the rule of law and of the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdic­tion of human rights and fundamen­tal freedoms, and collaborate sincerely and effectively in the realisation of the aim of the Council as specified in Chapter I.

Article 7

                   Any member of the Coun­cil of Europe may withdraw by formally notifying the Secre­tary General of its intention to do so. Such with­drawal shall take effect at the end of the financial year in which it is noti­fied, if the notification is given during the first nine months of that financial year. If the notification is given in the last three months of the finan­cial year, it shall take effect at the end of the next finan­cial year.

                   Article 8

                   Any member ofthe Coun­cil of Europe which has seriously vio­lated Article 3 may besuspended from its rights of repre­sentation and re­quested by the Committee ofMinisters to withdraw under Arti­cle 7. If such member does not complywith this request, the Commit­tee may decide that it has ceased to be a memberof the Council as from such date as the Committee may determine.

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The Council of Europe (French: Conseil de l'Europe) is an international organization promoting co-operation between all countries of Europe in the areas of legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural co-operation. It was founded in 1949, has 47 member states with some 800 million citizens, and is an entirely separate body^[1] from the European Union (EU), which has only 27 member states. Unlike the EU, the Council of Europe cannot make binding laws. The two do however share certain symbols such as the flag and the anthem.
The best known bodies of the Council of Europe are the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights, and the European Pharmacopoeia Commission, which sets the quality standards for pharmaceutical products in Europe. The Council of Europe's work has resulted in standards, charters and conventions to facilitate cooperation between European countries.
Its statutory institutions are the Committee of Ministers comprising the foreign ministers of each member state, the Parliamentary Assembly composed of MPs from the parliament of each member state, and the Secretary General heading the secretariat of the Council of Europe. The Commissioner for Human Rights is an independent institution within the Council of Europe, mandated to promote awareness of and respect for human rights in the member states.
The headquarters of the Council of Europe are in Strasbourg, France, with English and French as its two official languages. The Committee of Ministers, the Parliamentary Assembly and the Congress also use German, Italian, and Russian for some of their work.

History

 n a speech at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946, Sir Winston Churchill called for a "kind of United States of Europe" and the creation of a Council of Europe.^[2][3] He had spoken of a Council of Europe as early as 1943 in a radio broadcast.^[2]
The future structure of the Council of Europe was discussed at a specific congress of several hundred leading politicians, government representatives and civil society in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1948. There were two schools of thought competing: some favoured a classical international organisation with representatives of governments, while others preferred a political forum with parliamentarians. Both approaches were finally combined through the creation of the Committee of Ministers and the Parliamentary Assembly under the Statute of the Council of Europe. This dual intergovernmental and inter-parliamentary structure was later copied for the European Communities, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

 The Council of Europe was founded on 5 May 1949 by the Treaty of London. The Treaty of London or the Statute of the Council of Europe was signed in London on that day by ten states: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Many other states followed, especially after the democratic transitions in central and eastern Europe during the early 1990s, and the Council of Europe now includes all European states except Belarus,^[4] Kazakhstan,^[4] Vatican City^[5] and the European states with limited recognition.^[a]

Aims and achievements

Article 1(a) of the Statute states that "The aim of the Council of Europe is to achieve a greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage and facilitating their economic and social progress." Therefore, membership is open to all European states which seek European integration, accept the principle of the rule of law and are able and willing to guarantee democracy, fundamental human rights and freedoms.
While the member states of the European Union transfer national legislative and executive powers to the European Commission and the European Parliament in specific areas under European Community law, Council of Europe member states maintain their sovereignty but commit themselves through conventions (i.e., public international law) and co-operate on the basis of common values and common political decisions. Those conventions and decisions are developed by the member states working together at the Council of Europe, whereas secondary European Community law is set by the organs of the European Union. Both organisations function as concentric circles around the common foundations for European integration, with the Council of Europe being the geographically wider circle. The European Union could be seen as the smaller circle with a much higher level of integration through the transfer of powers from the national to the EU level. Being part of public international law, Council of Europe conventions could also be opened for signature to non-member states thus facilitating equal co-operation with countries outside Europe (see chapter below).
The Council of Europe's most famous achievement is the European Convention on Human Rights, which was adopted in 1950 following a report by the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly. The Convention created the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The Court supervises compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights and thus functions as the highest European court for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It is to this court that Europeans can bring cases if they believe that a member country has violated their fundamental rights.
The wide activities and achievements of the Council of Europe can be found in detail on its official website. In a nutshell, the Council of Europe works in the following areas:

• Protection of the rule of law and fostering legal co-operation through some 200 conventions and other treaties, including such leading instruments as the Convention on Cybercrime, the Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism, the Conventions against Corruption and Organised Crime, the Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, and the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine.^[6]

• CODEXTER, designed to co-ordinate counter-terrorism measures
• The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ)
• Protection of human rights, notably through:
  • the European Convention on Human Rights
  • the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture
  • the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance
  • the Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings^[7]
  • the Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse^[8]
  • social rights under the European Social Charter
  • linguistic rights under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
  • minority rights under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities
  • Media freedom under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Convention on Transfrontier Television
• Protection of democracy through parliamentary scrutiny and election monitoring by its Parliamentary Assembly as well as assistance in democratic reforms, in particular by the Venice Commission.
• Promotion of cultural co-operation and diversity under the Council of Europe's Cultural Convention of 1954 and several conventions on the protection of cultural heritage as well as through its Centre for Modern Languages in Graz, Austria, and its North-South Centre in Lisbon, Portugal.
• Promotion of the right to education under Article 2 of the first Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights and several conventions on the recognition of university studies and diplomas (see also Bologna Process and Lisbon Recognition Convention).
• Promotion of fair sport through the Anti-Doping Convention^[9] and the Convention against Spectator Violence.^[10]
• Promotion of European youth exchanges and co-operation through European Youth Centres in Strasbourg and Budapest, Hungary.
• Promotion of the quality of medicines throughout Europe by the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and its European Pharmacopoeia.

Institutions

The institutions of the Council of Europe are:

• The Secretary General, who is elected for a term of five years by the Parliamentary Assembly and heads the Secretariat of the Council of Europe. The current Secretary General is the former Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjørn Jagland, who took office on 1 October 2009.^[11]
• The Committee of Ministers, comprising the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of all 47 member states who are represented by their Permanent Representatives and Ambassadors accredited to the Council of Europe. Committee of Ministers' presidencies are held in alphabetical order for six months following the English alphabet: Turkey 11/2010-05/2011, Ukraine 05/2011-11/2011, the United Kingdom 11/2011-05/2012, Albania 05/2012-11/2012, Andorra 11/2012-05/2013, Armenia 05/2013-11/2013, Austria 11/2013-05/2014, and so on.
• The Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), which comprises national parliamentarians from all member states and elects its President for a year with the possibility of being re-elected for another year. In January 2010, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu from Turkey was elected President of the Parliamentary Assembly. National parliamentary delegations to the Assembly must reflect the political spectrum of their national parliament, i.e., comprise government and opposition parties. The Assembly appoints members as rapporteurs with the mandate to prepare parliamentary reports on specific subjects. The British MP Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe was rapporteur for the drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights. Dick Marty's reports on secret CIA detentions and rendition flights in Europe became quite famous in 2007. Other Assembly rapporteurs were instrumental in, for example, the abolition of the death penalty in Europe, the political and human rights situation in Chechnya, disappeared persons in Belarus, freedom of expression in the media and many other subjects.
• The Congress of the Council of Europe (Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe), which was created in 1994 and comprises political representatives from local and regional authorities in all member states. The most influential instruments of the Council of Europe in this field are the European Charter of Local Self-Government of 1985 and the European Outline Convention on Transfrontier Co-operation between Territorial Communities or Authorities of 1980.
• The European Court of Human Rights, created under the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950, is composed of a judge from each member state elected for a renewable term of six years by the Parliamentary Assembly and is headed by the elected President of the Court. Since 2007, Jean-Paul Costa from France is the President of the Court. Under the new Protocol No. 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights, the terms of office of judges shall be nine years but non-renewable. Ratification of Protocol No. 14 was delayed by Russia for a number of years, but won support to be passed in January 2010.
• The Commissioner for Human Rights, who is elected by the Parliamentary Assembly for a non-renewable term of six years since the creation of this position in 1999. Since April 2012, this position has been held by Nils Muižnieks from Latvia.
• The Conference of INGOs. NGOs can participate in the INGOs Conference of the Council of Europe. Since the [Resolution (2003)8] adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 19 November 2003, they are given a "participatory status".
• Information Offices of the Council of Europe in many member states.