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

Opening

Thank you, Peter. And thank you to Hudson Institute for the invitation. Your announcement was very frank. If you read it before signing up, you already know two things about us. The Council of Europe is not well known in Washington. And, worse, we get mistaken for the European Council, which is the European Union.

So if you came to talk about tariffs: wrong Council. If you came to talk about Canada joining the EU: also wrong Council. Even if I have an opinion. But if you came to talk about a Europe with the United Kingdom, Türkiye and Ukraine in it, then stay. That part gets interesting.

Force and law

That Europe had quite a week. On Greenland, after a year and a half of threats, an agreement was signed in New York. I was there to open our new office to the United Nations.

Fuel prices are soaring because of the Iran war, a war on the border of three Council of Europe member states: Türkiye, Armenia and Azerbaijan. And on Ukraine, after six months without progress, peace talks are moving again.

All of this is about force and the retreat of law. Seen from Europe, it is a rupture. The Council of Europe was created after the Second World War so that force would never again have the last word in Europe. That is what is at stake in Ukraine.

Visible and invisible

You have probably heard what we are doing to hold Russia accountable for its war of aggression with the Register of Damage, the Claims Commission, and the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression.

All of it is open to non-member states. The United States is part of the Register.

That is the visible part. The less visible part goes to the heart of Ukraine’s security: independent courts, the fight against corruption, elections, the protection of minorities.

Hard, soft, democratic

In Washington, you speak of hard security and soft security. We speak of democratic security. A security architecture that protects institutions, rights and freedoms. One that can address cyberattacks, terrorism, foreign interference and the threats still to come.

Let me take one example. Before last year’s Moldovan parliamentary elections, a Russian-funded network of just over 100 fake accounts racked up 50 million views in under three months, in a country of 2.4 million people. You no longer need to overturn an election to damage a democracy. All you need is to flood it with fakes and noise.

At the start of my mandate, I was shocked to hear a political leader in Germany called Hitler a communist during a campaign. No one blinked. Twenty-five years ago, no one would have said this out loud. Now it travels the world in seconds.

And artificial intelligence is amplifying it. I know Europe and the United States sometimes differ here. But a world that cannot agree on rules will hand AI to those who answer to no one. That should worry anyone, on both sides of the Atlantic, who still believes in accountability. The Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI is a binding international treaty. Like our work on Ukraine, it is open to countries outside Europe.

Common legal space

This is the strength of the Council of Europe: a common legal space, with treaties that do not stop at our borders. It is not imposed from above. It grows within national law itself.

Each time the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg decides a case, the effects are felt in all 46 countries at once. A shared legal DNA. The return is stability and peace.

We saw it in Northern Ireland. After thirty years of violence, the Good Friday Agreement needed something both sides could trust. It found that in the European Convention on Human Rights. So did the Dayton Agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And we stand ready for Ukraine.

The unthinkable

I will stop soon to keep time for your questions. But first, I want to remember one of Hudson’s founders, Herman Kahn, who pushed us to think about the unthinkable.

For us, the unthinkable is the return of the ideologies that led Europe into the Second World War.

Look at the election results in Germany in recent weeks. A few years ago, they would have been unthinkable. Now, no one is surprised.

Europe is rearming at a pace not seen since the Cold War. So our line is simple: rearm Europe without disarming democracy. Because what happens in ten years if an extremist government controls a heavily armed European state?

Closing

That question is behind everything we are doing. We are transforming the Council of Europe for what democratic security demands: anticipation and early warning, emergency formats, good offices and legal support through a crisis.

As crises accelerate, politics collapses into the very short term.

We are pushing the other way.

We are building what Europe needs: a legal and democratic framework that lasting European security can depend on, together with our allies and observer states, the United States among them.

Thank you.