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Your Eminence, Cardinal Parolin,

Dear Ministers,

Dear Minister of Justice of Aruba,

Dear Deputy Ministers from Portugal, Georgia, Ukraine, Serbia and Hungary,

Dear friends of the United Nations,

INTRO: FROM IDEA TO REALITY

Two years. Two years only between an idea and the office we are opening tonight.

It began with a conversation with Secretary-General Guterres, here in New York, during General Assembly week, just days into my mandate. We talked about Ukraine, about an international order under pressure, and about bringing our two organisations closer together.

I left convinced that we needed more than one week a year in New York. Tonight, our Permanent Observer Office to the United Nations is a reality. So is the rupture of the international legal order, the only order most of us have ever known.

RULES AND CONVENIENCE

We will face it together. Dear Guy, thank you for being here on the Secretary-General’s behalf. Thank you all for your support. You had many other places to be right now. You chose this one.

Your presence tells me we were right. Right to make a permanent home here. Right to work more closely with the United Nations and the regional and international organisations based here.

But being right is not enough. Not enough to stop a war. Not enough to keep disinformation out of elections. Not enough to hold old alliances together. New ones are forming. Some are built on fear. Some on convenience. The ones that last will be built on rules. You came tonight because you still believe in them.

FORCE AND IMPUNITY

And how could we not?

Ukraine is going into its fifth winter of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Dear Andrii, your country is still standing. And the Council of Europe has been there from the start.

Ukraine is still standing. And it is still defending the principle the Charter of the United Nations set down in 1945: borders are not redrawn by force.

This principle holds up peace and security beyond Europe. Gaza. A Middle East at war on Europe’s borders. The use and threat of force is contagious. Each time it goes unanswered, it becomes easier to repeat, and harder to pretend that the international legal order is still intact.

Blocs or no rules

And let us also be honest. Many countries here never felt this order was built for them. They have every reason to want it to change.

But look at what is on offer instead.

A world of blocs, where security depends on which side you are on. Or a world where every power writes its own rules. In both, force decides and double standards spread.

REGIONAL ROOTS, GLOBAL REACH

The Council of Europe offers another model. A common legal space, shared by 46 countries and more than 700 million people, with conventions that do not stop at our borders.

The Convention on Cybercrime has more than eighty parties, and nearly half of them are outside Europe. Benin, Fiji and Kiribati joined on the same day.

When we negotiated the first binding international treaty on artificial intelligence, countries from the Americas to Asia and the Pacific sat at the table.

The instruments we built with Ukraine to end impunity are open to every region.

Small states and great powers, on equal terms. Artificial intelligence, cybercrime, the environment, information manipulation and foreign interference.

No country, no organisation and no region will solve any of these challenges alone.

GEOGRAPHY AND CHOICE

This office exists to close the distance between regions. To engage with the United Nations. To build with the other regional organisations that work here. And to keep pushing for justice and democratic security, in Ukraine and wherever force tries to replace law.

Some treat geography as destiny. Geography decides who our neighbours are. We can decide who we stand with.

More and more, countries far apart find they stand in the same place: on the side of law.

It may be the most radical idea of this moment.

Some will call it naïve. Naïve is believing force will stop where it is now.

CLOSING: FORCE OR LAW

Let me end where our story here began. October 1989, when the General Assembly granted the Council of Europe observer status. Three weeks before the Berlin Wall fell.

No one in that hall could have known.

A year later, Hungary became the first country from behind the Iron Curtain to join the Council of Europe. Then another. And another. Democracy, human rights and the rule of law crossed a continent.

Our membership would more than double.

Since then, it has gone down only once. When one member chose force over law.

Today, we are forty-six. And new walls are going up.

In 1989, we were given a seat to observe.

Tonight, the Council of Europe opens a door to engage. With everyone ready to choose law over force. For an international legal order built by all and for all.

That is our programme here in New York. And thank you very much, Kelly, our head of the Council of Europe Office here in New York, for your work and dedication.

And thank you to all of you for being here this afternoon and supporting our common work.

Thank you.