As delivered

Friends, we are here to celebrate the Memorandum of Understanding between the Council of Europe and the European Union. In the ten years since the MoU was concluded, under San Marino’s Chairmanship of our Committee of Ministers, many people have helped make it a success: in Brussels, in Strasbourg, and in the states where the activities take place.

Many of you know that, upon his election in 2009, our Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland – who had hoped to be here today – made strengthening the Council of Europe’s relationship with the EU a clear priority.

He was adamant that any old, institutional rivalries should give way to fresh partnership, and he has been met with great openness and willingness from Brussels ever since.

Our co-operation has now reached an unprecedented intensity. The EU is now the Council of Europe’s main partner, politically and financially.

We have a more intense political dialogue than ever, with the different bodies of the EU and at the highest levels. Europe is facing many challenges – populism, extremism, terrorism, xenophobia, the refugee crisis – and on all these issues and more it has become our instinct to reach out to one and other. This was not always the case.

We work ever more closely on matters which are important to both of us. The death penalty, for example.

Also social rights, where the Council of Europe very much supports the EU’s initiative to establish a new European pillar, which we believe would benefit from incorporating the existing European Social Charter. 

We continue to reinforce our legal co-operation. Whether through our European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice, or “CEPEJ”, providing data to the EU’s Commission on the functioning of judicial systems in the EU28, which then informs the Commission’s Justice Scoreboard. Or through our co-operation with FRONTEX, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, or FRA, the Agency for Fundamental Rights.

We continue to look for ways for the EU to participate in Council of Europe legal instruments. We were extremely pleased last year, for example, when the EU committed to ratifying, as a bloc, the Additional Protocol to our anti-terror Convention, which helps states criminalise the early acts of preparation for terror, enabling them to more easily go after foreign terrorist fighters.

Participation in other Europe instruments remains an extremely important goal including, for example, our Istanbul Convention to prevent violence against women; our Lanzarote Convention to prevent the sexual abuse of children; and our Match-fixing Convention. We are also still very much in favour of the EU acceding to GRECO, our anti-corruption watchdog, and putting its Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive to evaluation by Moneyval, our anti money-laundering body. 

And, of course, we continue to look forward to the day when the EU accedes to the mother convention: the European Convention on Human Rights.  Few acts would go as far to confirming that our organisations stand shoulder-to-shoulder for the fundamental freedoms on which modern Europe must be built.

And, in addition to our political and legal co-operation, we also continue to strengthen the third strand of our partnership: our joint programmes.

I am very pleased that this element of our work is being given some attention today. It is perhaps the one we speak about least, but, in a sense, these projects are the most tangible expressions of our relationship. In a sense, they are what everything else – the political dialogue and the legal co-operation – is for: to bring our shared values – democracy, human rights and the rule of law – as close as possible to people’s everyday lives.

Together, through these programmes, we make a real difference to people, on the ground. This matters. And it matters even more so at a time of growing nationalism and populism, when more and more voices are questioning the value of international co-operation and of European institutions.

Through our joint programmes we help national authorities and other actors turn high democratic ideals into concrete laws and practices. And we do so by drawing on the relative strengths of our organisations.

The Council of Europe is, as it says in the MoU, the “benchmark for human rights, rule of law and democracy in Europe”. But, without the EU’s support, the assistance we provide would be much more modest and less effective. The EU remains the major source of funding of the Council of Europe’s technical assistance and co-operation projects. It has contributed some 270 million euros to Joint Programmes in the last 10 years, for which we are very grateful.

The underlying reason for this support, is, of course, that we share many of the same goals. The EU's objectives for its neighbouring regions – including states in Eastern Europe as well as accession and candidate countries in the South-East, which are all Council of Europe member states – align closely with our priorities: we both recognise that any  nation seeking stability and prosperity is most likely to achieve it through strong democratic institutions and deep democratic culture.

No country has ever joined the EU without being a member of the Council of Europe first, and we appreciate very much the recognition from the EU that sustained commitment to our standards remains vital for any country integrating into, and being an active part of, the European family.

There have been many successful joint projects which you will hear more about.

And over the last ten years we have learnt some important lessons.

We aim to work as closely as possible with national authorities and other stakeholders, including civil society. In order to do this, the Council of Europe has reformed and reinforced our External Presence, delivering co-operation and technical assistance “in-country” through our local offices, including programme and project offices. We now have a network of 17 field offices with some 300 staff, who work closely with their colleagues in Strasbourg.

This arrangement combines the best of our local knowledge with the best of our legal expertise.

We also strive continually to improve our approach to project management and to the measurability of results, so that we can be confident that we achieve the results that we set out to achieve. The Council of Europe has invested a lot of energy and resource into developing our new Project Management Methodology, which  helps ensure that we establish a clear results chain, and makes it easier to obtain aggregate data and information, so that we can properly evaluate our efforts.

The learning process never ends, and I am confident that we will continue to become even more efficient and effective.

I am confident that we will continue to build on our successes, achieving even more in the countries with whom we are working.

And I am confident that, on all these fronts – political, legal and technical – the Council of Europe and the European Union can work even more closely in the years to come.

What unites us, above all, is that we share the same values. The same belief that, in Europe, freedom and the rule of law are not somehow secondary to concerns over security and prosperity – they are the means by which stability and prosperity are achieved.

In 2012, when the EU received the Nobel Peace Prize, it was "for over six decades having contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe". The Council of Europe exists to advance these very aims.

They are as important as ever in Europe today. And we look forward to continuing to work for them, tirelessly, day-in, day-out, alongside the European Union, our dear partner and our friend.