The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is rapidly losing its effectiveness and is becoming a formal platform that imitates protection of democracy, human rights and the rule of law in Europe.
An analysis of the Assembly’s final resolutions shows how this international platform ignores completely the key issues of the European agenda following the results of the Strasbourg PACE winter session.
Many delegations consider Russia’s formal return and the second-attempt election of Russian representative Piotr Tolstoy as the PACE deputy as a critical result of the session. However, the event is far from being decisive in terms of the winter session results and forecasts of the future of the organization.
De facto the Russian delegation’s return is the result of a financial deal: the PACE membership cost Russia over €88 million, including its debt for 2019 (€33 million) and interest for 2017-2018 (€55 million). Thus, Russia used the financial deal to compensate the European community’s political claims sent to its address. European countries show low interest and willingness to finance international platforms such as PACE amid the EU crisis caused by Brexit and a current conflict of interest within the European Union. Thus, the European community agreed to give Piotr Tolstoy the PACE high-raking position in exchange for Russia’s financial resource.
Paradoxically, against the backdrop of the Russian delegation’s return and the appointment of its representative to the PACE leadership, the Assembly in its final resolution obliged the Kremlin to take a number of specific measures to solve problems on violations of democratic human rights and freedoms and the rule of law rights, both in the territory of the temporarily occupied Crimea, and throughout Russia. The resolution recognized Russia as a party to the Minsk agreements that Moscow has fiercely resisted for the past few years. The PACE resolution also obliged Moscow to implement the Minsk agreements, stop military intervention and any support for armed groups in eastern Ukraine. Moreover, PACE obliged the Kremlin to stop the annexation of Crimea, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and demanded cooperation in the investigation of MH17 plane shoot down in 2014 as well. According to the PACE resolution, Russia should also stop obstructing the implementation of the European Court of Human Rights decisions, and take measures to eliminate violations of the LGBT community rights.
Thus, Russia’s return to PACE and the election of its representative to the leadership of the Assembly did not affect the tone of the PACE resolutions. In turn, Tolstoy’s statement that Russia will never agree with the Council of Europe’s postulates regarding Crimea, violations of the LGBT community rights and the implementation of the ECHR decisions actually returned Russia to the status of a renegade and the country that does not share the European values and ignores the norms of international law. However, since now Russia is officially the part of this process its behavior is criticized categorically in the presence of its delegation in the session hall that is more humiliating. As a result, a precedent when a member of an organization may violate its fundamental principles was set.
However, beside the issue of Russian representation in PACE, the Assembly’s crisis is also proved by the absence in its agenda of critical items of European democracy such as the judicial problem in Poland and the crisis of freedom of speech in Hungary.
According to Georgian Foreign Minister David Zalkaliani, the CoE aims to promote and protect the fundamental rights of all individuals in Europe, without exception. ‘Nevertheless, we continue to witness grave human rights violations in the areas remaining outside of the control of national authorities and population is deprived of their basic rights, guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights’, he said, adding that these areas remain inaccessible by the international organizations, including the CoE.
Thus, PACE found itself incapable of influencing human rights violations and potential threats to democracy, not only with respect to major and difficult to control players like Russia, but also with the EU members themselves.
The loss of influence on democracy priority line and the rule of law will lead to the fact that the economic union in its pure form will remain the only foundation of United Europe. Eventually, it will put the EU in serious turbulence in times of economic crisis that under such circumstances sooner or later will result in its collapse. Even today some member states are demonstrating their willingness to ignore principles in favor of economic benefits. This fact is confirmed by the pessimistic scenario of the EU collapse in case of loss of democratic values as priority, protection of sovereignty, territorial value, sovereignty and unacceptability of violations of these principles.
The statements by individual representatives of national delegations conflicting with European values, such as the proposal to introduce representatives of the separatist puppet republics of Donbass into the process of resolving the Ukrainian conflict, threatens to set a precedent for attempts to legalize in the same way autonomies in Spain, Belgium, Italy and other countries where the issue of autonomy of territories and separatism relates with economic downturn periods and has historical preconditions for outside activation.
In case of the situation continues PACE will eventually turn into a discussion platform functioning at the expense of countries seeking to legitimize authoritarian regimes and violations of civil rights and liberties.Some countries like Great Britain, Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltic countries can consider the situation as a signal to search for new platforms and associations to protect more effectively the values served as their motivation to join the European community. Continuous attempts of Germany and France to fight for economic leadership in the EU amid weak motivation for integration processes in Europe and loss of priority of European values will only strengthen the EU’s collapse trends.
