A Europe without political prisoners and without wars

The Council of Europe as a club of democracies watching over each other is as important today as it was when it was founded in 1949. Over the last two decades, however, the Council of Europe repeatedly bowed to pressure from autocrats and failed to uphold its basic principles. The expulsion of Russia offers important lessons on how the Council of Europe can recover its soul.

ESI newsletter: Historic vote – Kosovo’s breakthrough – a Unicorn (24 April 2024)

ESI background: Guide to a Crime Scene - Azerbaijan and the Council of Europe: State repression and those who fight it (3 April 2024)

ESI newsletter: Azerbaijan thriller – Political prisoners and how to recover the soul of the Council of Europe (28 March 2024)

The Council of Europe was created with high hopes in London in April 1949. In the years leading to the Second World War, its predecessor, the League of Nations, had failed and would not recover. The Council of Europe was supposed to do better. Its core idea of a club of democracies watching over each other to remain democracies is as important today as it was back then.

Reacting to systemic human rights abuses is a matter of European security. Alas, this lesson had been forgotten in the past two decades in the Council of Europe. There are political prisoners in Azerbaijan and Turkey. In the past years Azerbaijan has two times attacked Armenia, another Council of Europe member state, and under president Aleksandar Vucic Serbia poses a similar threat towards Kosovo.

Russia offers an important lesson in this regard. The Council of Europe did not react when Putin’s Russia sent troops to Georgia, a Council of Europe member, in 2008. Nor when Boris Nemtsov was killed in front of the Kremlin in 2015. Nor when Russian agents tried to kill Alexey Navalny in 2020. When Russia forcibly annexed Crimea and then invaded Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, only PACE reacted and suspended its voting rights. And then, instead of the Council of Europe putting pressure on Russia, Russia put pressure on the Council of Europe.

In October 2016, Leonid Slutsky, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Russian Duma, insisted: “Russia will return [to PACE] only if certain decisions are changed.” In summer 2017, Russia resorted to financial blackmail, refusing to pay its contribution to the organisation “until full and unconditional restoration of the credentials of the delegation.” In 2018, it dictated its terms: Russia would only return to PACE, and pay its outstanding fees, if the Assembly changed its rules to make it harder to remove credentials ever again. Otherwise, it threatened to leave the organisation altogether. The Council of Europe changed its rules. Leonid Slutksy celebrated this in 2021 as a diplomatic defeat of Ukraine and the Baltic states.

The rest is known. Russia, with its delegation back in PACE, sent Alexey Navalny to a penal colony. It continued to ignore all judgements by the European Court of Human Rights. It used even more violence to suppress critics across Russia. It rolled back its few remaining civic liberties. It moved against its most well-respected human rights organisation, Memorial. It prepared the ground for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This invasion has become the bloodiest war in Europe since the Council of Europe’s founding in 1949. By the time Russia was finally suspended and expelled, massive harm had been done.

In this tragedy, the Council of Europe mattered. Autocrats captured and silenced it. They used their membership as a cover for dismantling human rights at home and Council of Europe officials played along. In April 2022, with over a hundred political prisoners in Azerbaijan Marija Pejcinovic Buric, then Secretary General of the Council of Europe, said in Baku:

“On the rule of law, there has been important progress too ... nearly 500 journalists and civil society representatives have been trained on Council of Europe standards on gender equality and media freedom.”

And today, the regime in Baku tries the same playbook again, confident that it will work once more. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has conquered Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and has been aggressively posturing towards adjacent regions in Armenia. His historical claims and recent military actions signal a serious intent to reclaim perceived Azerbaijani lands by force. The number of political prisoners has soared, reaching 288 in March 2024.

Since a few years threats by Serbia towards Kosovo have also intensified. On 14 June 2023, Serbian special police forces abducted three Kosovo border police officers and kept them as prisoners for twelve days. On 23 June, Kosovo police stopped a Serb car moving weapons in the North of Kosovo. On 24 September 2023, heavily armed Serb paramilitaries attacked Kosovo police in the North of Kosovo, killing one. The Serb paramilitaries then barricaded themselves in the Orthodox Banjska Monastery. In the exchange of fire with the Kosovo police, three of the assailants were shot. The leader of the attack was the then deputy president of Srpska Lista, the Kosovo sister party of Serbian president Vucic’s SNS. European Commissioner Janez Lenarcic told the European Parliament that: “The scale of this operation [on 24 September] is unprecedented. The quantity of confiscated weapons is massive … the situation in the North of Kosovo is extremely serious.” On 29 November 2024 an explosion damaged the Ibar-Lepenec canal in the North of Kosovo, crucial infrastructure providing drinking water to several municipalities and water for the cooling system of Kosovo’s largest power plant.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has withheld the credentials from the Azeri delegation to PACE. The Committee of Ministers should turn to the wisdom of the Council of Europe’s founders and remember lessons from its own disastrous failure confronting Putin’s Russia. And send two strong and simple messages:

First, no member state of the Council of Europe can have political prisoners. If this issue is not addressed, the Committee of Ministers should follow the lead of PACE and suspend Azerbaijan’s membership, based on Article 8 of the Statutes. Similar steps should also be explored with regard to Turkey.

Second, no member state of the Council of Europe must wage a war of aggression against another member. If that happens, the aggressor has to be expelled immediately. The Committee of Ministers should state this clearly, as a general principle, before it is too late again.

The sobering lessons from Russia in the years before 2022 is that in the end, the only way to keep a country in the Council of Europe is not by closing one’s eyes and sacrificing all standards but by insisting, in time, that the country abides by the Council’s standards or leaves. This is the way both to promote human rights and to increase the chance of international peace and security.