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Speech by Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe

Secretary General Sinirlioğlu,
Chairperson of the Permanent Council, Ambassador Nägeli,
Excellencies, Delegates,

It is a pleasure to be back here in Vienna at the OSCE.

A lot has happened since I last addressed your Permanent Council.

It was only seven months ago, but the geopolitical landscape has transformed.

So much so that many are speaking of a rupture in the international legal order.

***

I want to take the next few minutes to reflect on what this moment means for our two organisations and for Europe.

But I am really looking forward to your questions and to our conversation afterward.

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A good place to start is with the recent elections in Armenia and Hungary.

Democracy is full of surprises.

It is just when many have written it off that it proves us wrong.

And let me be clear: this is not about who won and who lost.

It is about what Armenians and Hungarians voted for.

Peace. Stability. Accountability. A say in their own future. This is what the elections were about.

And they remind us that democracy is difficult, that it is under pressure. But that democracy is very much alive on our continent.

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So where do organisations like ours fit into this?

The Council of Europe has a distinct role to play.

Our Court, the European Court of Human Rights, has dealt with more than one million applications since its creation. One million.

It has guided European states through threats to judicial independence, political turmoil, and even war.

At its heart is the European Convention on Human Rights.

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The Convention. The Court. A system of standards and monitoring that holds it together. And this across 46 countries, spanning our entire continent.

This is the Council of Europe’s common legal space.

It is not something separate, imposed on states from above.

The law grows within national law itself.

Each time a decision is made in Strasbourg, its effects are felt in all 46 countries at once.

This common legal space gives Europe a shared legal DNA.

And more than that, it is a guarantee of stability and of peace.

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This is not theory.

In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement made the Convention part of the law.

One set of rights that nationalists and unionists could both rely on, when they could agree on little else.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Convention sits at the very top of the constitutional order Dayton built, binding communities that had just been at war.

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Law is Europe’s form of power. And this is where our two organisations meet.

Minorities. Human trafficking. Terrorism. Elections. On all of these, the Council of Europe and the OSCE already work together.

Last month in Chișinău, Mr Secretary General, when we met with Chairman-in-Office Cassis and Minister Popșoi, we agreed our cooperation must deliver more.

We asked our joint Coordination Group to identify concrete opportunities for cooperation. It will report back in November.

***

This important meeting took place right before the Council of Europe’s ministerial session.

I want to share with you a few outcomes of that session, because they go directly to the security order every state represented in this room depends on.

The first one brings me back to where I began today. To the elections in Armenia and Hungary.

In both, manufactured lies tried to decide for voters before voters could decide for themselves.

They failed. This time. But the threat will return. And it will not stop at elections.

In Chișinău, the Council of Europe took an important step toward a Framework Convention on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference. 

Its goal is to defend democratic choice, not to police what people say.

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This raises the question of double standards.

The risk that rules like these get applied to some and not to others.

I will not pretend the danger is not real. We will not always get it right.

But the answer is not to abandon the rule. It is to hold ourselves to it, every time, without exception.

***

Another critical outcome from Chișinău concerns Ukraine.

This week, the UN said the war is at its deadliest point in four years.

Almost 11 million people in Ukraine need humanitarian assistance.

More than 160,000 claims have been submitted to our Register of Damage.

It is against this backdrop that, in Chișinău, 36 countries and the European Union declared their intention to join the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine.

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Without accountability, there can be no lasting peace in Ukraine. 

Justice, elections, and the protection of minorities will all be part of any settlement.

The Council of Europe is already working with Ukrainian institutions on each of them.

For peace to last, it can only rest on international law, and on the fundamental freedoms and human rights common to our two organisations.

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The ministerial session in Chișinău also had an important outcome on migration.

Few questions divide Europe like migration.

Too often, the debate is framed as a trade-off: control without law, or rights without control.

That is a false choice.

In Chișinău, our member states showed there is another way.

They stood by the Convention and the independence of the European Court of Human Rights, and recognised the need to balance the public interest with individual rights.

Security and legality, moving together.

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A convention against interference. A tribunal for aggression. A line held on migration.

These are not separate, isolated decisions.

They are the building blocks of democratic security.

Democratic security rests on institutions people can trust, laws that protect everyone equally, and the stability that lets democracy grow.

As our societies face new pressures, it is also the capacity to confront cyberattacks, terrorism, and the threats still to come.

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The threats we face will not be met by any nation, or any organisation, standing apart.

They will be met together, or not at all.

This is what those who built the Council of Europe and the OSCE understood.

They faced different dangers, in different times.

But they shared one conviction: that peace rests on law, not force.

They left us the work unfinished.

It is ours now.

To build the Europe they imagined.

Safe. Free. Whole.
 

Thank you.