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

Ministers,
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,

I am pleased to join you here today. I would like to thank Portugal and Greece for bringing this event together with the Council of Europe, on the margins of the General Assembly, to explore the links between social rights and democracy.

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I will be brief because we want to leave ample space for our discussion.

A good place to start is the state of democracy, and it has not been going in the right direction.

Recent studies all point the same way.

For more than a decade now, more countries have been moving backwards than forwards.

For the average person in the world, democracy has slipped back to where it stood in the late 1970s. Half a century of progress, almost erased.

For the first time in a generation, there are more autocracies in the world than democracies.

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And this is not something happening to others. Established democracies, including in Europe, are part of this trend.

At the same time, the world has seen more armed conflicts than at any point since records began after the Second World War.

This is no coincidence. Where democracy weakens, peace becomes fragile.

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Today, we are facing two ruptures at once. And it is no accident that they are happening together.

The first is a rupture in the international legal order. The principles that states agreed after the Second World War, including those in the Charter of the United Nations, are bent or simply being ignored.

The second rupture, less visible but just as dangerous, is happening inside our societies.

Across Europe, more people feel the system no longer works for them. Housing costs more. Healthcare is out of reach for many. Wages don’t follow. And now many are asking what artificial intelligence will do to their jobs.

One question becomes impossible to avoid. Can democracy still deliver?

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This is a question of security.

There is this old distinction between “hard security” and “soft security.”

But for people, security is being safe from violence. And it is being able to live a decent life, with perspectives for the future.

When that breaks down, trust in democracy goes with it. And a society that stops trusting democracy is easier to divide and to manipulate.

We need to rethink our idea of security and move towards democratic security. Democratic security protects people, their rights and the institutions that serve them. And it is built on social rights.

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Europe already has an instrument for this: the European Social Charter, the social constitution of Europe.

In March, in Chișinău, the member states of the Council of Europe renewed their commitment to it and linked social rights directly to democratic security. We are now building this link into the New Democratic Pact for Europe.

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Europe cannot deliver on social rights alone.

The Council of Europe’s new Permanent Observer Office, opened here yesterday, will help us work more closely with the United Nations and with regional and international organisations to move social rights and democratic security forward together.

I look forward to our discussion.

Thank you.