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

 

Good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for your warm welcome.

And thank you to Principal Helen Mountfield and to the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights for the invitation.

It is a pleasure to join Attorney General Richard Hermer.

***

The last time I came here, I spoke at the Oxford Union as President of Switzerland, just weeks before leaving government.

That lecture was entitled “Switzerland in a Fractured World.”

Less than three years later, that fracture has become a rupture.

***

I have a confession to make.

When I took office a year and a half ago, I thought we would be working on how to repair the international legal order.

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine had already dealt a heavy blow.

But I did not expect that within weeks, we would be asking whether that order still held.

And I certainly did not imagine that one of our member states would soon be faced with the risk of military action from one of our closest allies.

***

Let us be honest: the postwar order was never flawless.

The powerful have never hesitated to bend it when it suited them.

But when those responsible for it openly and systematically question international law, the damage goes far beyond another violation.

We are now in a phase of deliberate deconstruction of the international legal order.

And when force begins to replace law between states, it does not stay there.

It works its way back into our democracies, weakening the rule of law from within.

***

The rupture did not happen overnight.

Its roots go deeper.

The financial crisis. COVID. The cost-of-living crisis. Populism.

We told ourselves they were setbacks.

Then Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, just eight years after Crimea.

These were not separate shocks.

They were deep cracks in the architecture.

Together, they created what I called a “perfect storm” for the international order.

***

We were not prepared for what came next.

Gaza. Venezuela. Greenland. The war in Iran.

The acceleration continues.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is now in its fifth year.

Another war on Europe’s borders is sending shockwaves through our economies.

A longtime ally is testing the limits of the transatlantic relationship.

Each unchallenged threat or use of force pushes the order closer to the brink.

The risk is that we start to think this is normal. We cannot get used to it.

***

So where do we go from here?

We can always express outrage.

Speak eloquently about our values.

Issue another declaration.

And quietly accept irrelevance.

That is sentimentalism.

Or we can cling to structures that no longer work, and confuse continuity with stability.

That is atrophy.

Both preserve the status quo.

Neither will protect Europe.

***

A third way has emerged.

This is Prime Minister Carney’s middle-power approach.

It comes down to four words: be principled and pragmatic.

It is easy to see the appeal.

Some European leaders have since repackaged versions of it as political realism.

But both put us on a dangerous path.

Once principles are treated as flexible, everything else soon follows.

Rules give way to deals. Law becomes contingent. Standards are negotiable.

And that is how double standards take hold.

How exceptions spread, slowly but surely.

***

This third way is a false choice between compromise and surrender.

It asks Europe to soften its principles at the very moment it most needs to know what it stands for.

If we fail to articulate a legal and political vision, others will fill the vacuum.

And they will not necessarily share our values.

Europe needs to be clear again about what it is defending.

And ask whether force alone will ever be enough to protect it.

Especially as Europe rearms on the biggest scale since the Cold War.

The simple fact is that, in ten years’ time, some of Europe’s strongest armies could be in the hands of extremist parties.

That should give us pause.

***

That is where Europe’s current security model falls short.

And this is where democratic security must begin.

For too long, we have underestimated the strategic value of social rights, health, education and institutional trust.

We have dismissed them as “soft” security.

But that divide belongs to the last century.

It no longer fits the Europe we live in.

***

Today, real security begins with institutions people can trust and democracies that can withstand pressure.

But that is not how we usually see it.

What we have is a pyramid, with defence at the top and rights and social cohesion at the bottom.

Yet military power protects a democracy only if democracy remains strong enough to control it.

That changes our assumptions about security.

And with them, how we address some of the most difficult questions facing Europe.

***

Disinformation. Migration. Social exclusion. Artificial intelligence.

Europe is often told there are only two options: control without legal restraint, or principle without protection.

That is the trap.

Faced with questions this complex, the right answers are rarely black and white.

***

Take foreign information manipulation and interference.

The Republic of Moldova recently showed what democratic resilience looks like under pressure from disinformation and hybrid attacks.

Free and fair elections are a prime target.

But so are courts, parliaments, schools, and even our brains, as the new MI6 chief put it.

When facts and lies compete for attention, truth does not always win.

The Council of Europe is developing a new legal instrument in this field.

It is designed to protect democratic choice, not police speech.

***

My next example is migration.

The pressures around irregular migration are real.

But migrants have dignity, like you and me. They have rights.

The answer cannot be to turn the European Court of Human Rights into a political scapegoat.

The Court’s independence and impartiality are our bedrock.

Next month in Chișinău, ministers will adopt a political declaration on migration.

Prepared within the framework of the European Convention on Human Rights, it shows that security and legality can move together.

***

(SG takes out the pocket Convention, shows it to the audience.)

Half of Britons say they do not know much about the Convention.

I carry it with me for a reason.

In these times of rupture, the Convention is Europe’s democratic compass.

It is all here.

Our rights. Our freedoms. The limits on power. The hard lessons of our history.

Its message is simple: there can be no human rights without democracy, and no democracy without the rule of law.

***

Democratic security protects people and democracy by keeping power subject to democratic accountability.

It is not a luxury for calmer times.

Without it, hard security cannot hold for long, even when it looks strong.

Going forward, our task is to rebuild trust in institutions and strengthen democratic resilience in an age of permanent crisis.

That is the ambition of the New Democratic Pact for Europe.

***

Nowhere is this more evident than in Ukraine.

With the Register of Damage and the Claims Commission, the Council of Europe is helping put accountability in place where none existed before.

But accountability cannot stop there.

I want to commend the United Kingdom for joining the Council of Europe’s Enlarged Partial Agreement on the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine.

This is a decisive step toward accountability for one of the gravest violations of international law.

International law does not exist for the benefit of a few.

It is either universal or meaningless.

***

The Council of Europe places democratic resilience at the centre of Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction.

Every reform to strengthen judicial independence, fight corruption, and prepare for free and fair elections is a building block of democratic security.

When politics is collapsing into the ultra-short term all around us, the Council of Europe is pushing in the opposite direction.

***

We were born of the last rupture.

The order that followed has held for almost eighty years.

Now the Council of Europe must look beyond this rupture and confront what this Organisation must become.

The threats have changed. They are bigger, more sophisticated. 

Europe cannot respond to instability through improvised formats and fragmented responses alone.

It needs to reinforce and renew the existing structures already in place.

So Europe can better anticipate, coordinate and respond to challenges to stability and democratic security across the continent as a whole.

This is what lasting security requires.

That is the space the Council of Europe can help fill.

***

Europe does not have to choose between security and democracy.

It never did. And it cannot afford to start now.

Not when the rules of the established order cease to be self-evident.

Not when the balance is shifting.

And not when the force of law must take precedence over the law of force.

***

I look forward to your questions.

And to the exchange with Attorney General Richard Hermer.

Thank you.