The Council of Europe (CoE; French: Conseil de l’Europe, CdE) is an international organisation founded in the wake of World War II to uphold human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in Europe.[3] Founded in 1949, it has 46 member states, with a population of approximately 675 million, and operates with an annual budget of approximately 500 million euros.
The organisation is distinct from the European Union (EU), although it is sometimes confused with it, partly because the EU has adopted the original European flag, created for the Council of Europe in 1955,[5] as well as the European anthem.[6] The Council of Europe is an official United Nations Observer.[7]
Being an international organization, the Council of Europe cannot make laws, but it does have the ability to push for the enforcement of select international agreements reached by member states on various topics. The best known body of the Council of Europe is the European Court of Human Rights, which functions on the basis of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The council’s two statutory bodies are the Committee of Ministers, comprising the foreign ministers of each member state, and the Parliamentary Assembly, composed of members of the national parliaments of each member state. The Commissioner for Human Rights is an institution within the Council of Europe, mandated to promote awareness of and respect for human rights in the member states. The Secretary General presides over the secretariat of the organisation. Other major CoE bodies include the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and the European Audiovisual Observatory.
The headquarters of the Council of Europe, as well as its Court of Human Rights, are situated in Strasbourg, France. English and French are its two official languages. The Committee of Ministers, the Parliamentary Assembly, and the Congress of the Council of Europe also use German and Italian for some of their work.
In a speech in 1929, French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand floated the idea of an organisation which would gather European nations together in a “federal union” to resolve common problems.[8] But it was Britain’s wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill who first publicly suggested the creation of a “Council of Europe” in a BBC radio broadcast on 21 March 1943,[9] while the Second World War was still raging. In his own words,[10] he tried to “peer through the mists of the future to the end of the war”, and think about how to re-build and maintain peace on a shattered continent. Given that Europe had been at the origin of two world wars, the creation of such a body would be, he suggested, “a stupendous business”. He returned to the idea during a well-known speech at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946,[11][12] throwing the full weight of his considerable post-war prestige behind it. But there were many other statesmen and politicians across the continent, many of them members of the European Movement, who were quietly working towards the creation of the council. Some regarded it as a guarantee that the horrors of war could never again be visited on the continent, others came to see it as a “club of democracies”, built around a set of common values that could stand as a bulwark against totalitarian states belonging to the Eastern Bloc. Others again saw it as a nascent “United States of Europe”, the resonant phrase that Churchill had reached for at Zurich in 1946.
The future structure of the Council of Europe was discussed at the Congress of Europe which brought together several hundred leading politicians, government representatives and members of civil society in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1948. There were two competing schools of thought: 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 a Committee of Ministers (in which governments were represented) and a Consultative Assembly (in which parliaments were represented), the two main bodies mentioned in the Statute of the Council of Europe. This dual intergovernmental and inter-parliamentary structure was later copied for the European Communities, NATO and OSCE.
