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| Council of Europe, Strasbourg |
Today, The Grandma has flown from Barcelona to Strasbourg to visit some authorities in the Council of Europe.
The Council of Europe is an international organisation whose stated aim is to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe and The Grandma is very worried about the repression that the Catalan population is suffering. Catalan people are European citizens and they must have their rights protected and guaranteed by institutions like this.
Self-determination is a right, not a crime and The Grandma wants to know which are the position and the opinion of the Council of Europe about Catalan issue. She has chosen a special date to her visit because the Council of Europe was founded following a speech by Winston Churchill at the University of Zurich on a day like today in 1946.
Before visiting the Council of Europe, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.
The Council of Europe, Conseil de l'Europe in French or Europarat in German, is an international organisation whose stated aim is to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe.
Founded in 1949, it has 47 member states, covers approximately 820 million people and operates with an annual budget of approximately 500 million euros.
The organisation is distinct from the 28-nation European Union (EU), although it is sometimes confused with it, partly because the EU has adopted the original European Flag which was created by the Council of Europe in 1955, as well as the European Anthem. No country has ever joined the EU without first belonging to the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe is an official United Nations Observer.
More information: Council of Europe
Unlike the EU, the Council of Europe cannot make binding laws, but it does have the power to enforce select international agreements reached by European states on various topics. The best known body of the Council of Europe is the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Council's two
statutory bodies are the Committee of Ministers, comprising the foreign
ministers of each member state, and the Parliamentary Assembly, composed
of members of the national parliaments of each member state.
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| The Grandma visits the Council of Europe |
The Commissioner for Human Rights is an independent institution within the Council of Europe, mandated to promote awareness of and respect for human rights in the member states.
The Secretary General heads the secretariat of the organisation. Other major CoE bodies include the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and the European Audiovisual Observatory.
The Secretary General heads the secretariat of the organisation. Other major CoE bodies include the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and the European Audiovisual Observatory.
The headquarters of the Council of Europe are in Strasbourg, France. English and French are its two official languages. The Committee of Ministers, the Parliamentary Assembly and the Congress also use German, Italian, and Russian for some of their work.
In a speech in 1929,
French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand floated the idea of an
organisation which would gather European nations together in a federal
union to resolve common problems. But it was Britain's wartime leader
Sir Winston Churchill who first publicly suggested the creation of a
Council of Europe in a BBC radio broadcast on 21 March 1943, while the
second world war was still raging. In his own words, he tried to peer
through the mists of the future to the end of the war, once victory had
been achieved, and think about how to re-build and maintain peace on a
shattered continent. Given that Europe had been at the origin of two
world wars, the creation of such a body would be, he suggested, a
stupendous business. He returned to the idea during a well-known speech
at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946, throwing the full
weight of his considerable post-war prestige behind it.
More information: @coe
The future structure of the Council of Europe was discussed at a specific congress of several hundred leading politicians, government representatives and civil society in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1948.
There were two schools
of thought competing: some favoured a classical international
organisation with representatives of governments, while others preferred
a political forum with parliamentarians. Both approaches were finally
combined through the creation of a Committee of Ministers (in which
governments were represented) and a Consultative Assembly (in which
parliaments were represented), the two main bodies mentioned in the
Statute of the Council of Europe. This dual intergovernmental and
inter-parliamentary structure was later copied for the European
Communities, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe.
The Council of Europe
was founded on 5 May 1949 by the Treaty of London. The Statute was
signed in London on that day by ten states: Belgium, Denmark, France,
Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the
United Kingdom, though Turkey and Greece joined three months later.
On
10 August 1949, 100 members of the Council's Consultative Assembly,
parliamentarians drawn from the twelve member nations, met in Strasbourg
for its first plenary session, held over 18 sittings and lasting nearly
a month. They debated how to reconcile and reconstruct a continent
still reeling from war, yet already facing a new East-West divide,
launched the concept of a trans-national court to protect the basic
human rights of every European citizen, and took the first steps towards
what would in time become the European Union.
In August 1949,
Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium was elected as the first president of the
Assembly, steering its early work. However in December 1951, after
nearly three years in the role, Spaak resigned in disappointment after
the Assembly rejected proposals for a European political authority.
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| The Grandma leaves the Council of Europe |
Convinced the Council of Europe was never going to be strong enough to achieve his long-term goal of European unification, he soon tried again in a different format, becoming one of the founders of the European Union.
The Council of Europe's most famous achievement is the European Convention on Human Rights, which was adopted in 1950 following a report by the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, and followed on from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The Convention created the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The Court supervises compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights and thus functions as the highest European court. It is to this court that Europeans can bring cases if they believe that a member country has violated their fundamental rights and freedoms.
The seat of the Council
of Europe is in Strasbourg, France. First meetings were held in
Strasbourg's University Palace in 1949, but the Council of Europe soon
moved into its own buildings. The Council of Europe's eight main
buildings are situated in the Quartier européen, an area in the
northeast of Strasbourg spread over the three districts of Le Wacken, La
Robertsau and Quartier de l'Orangerie, where are also located the four
buildings of the seat of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the Arte
headquarters and the seat of the International Institute of Human
Rights.
The Council of Europe was founded on 5 May 1949 by Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Greece joined three months later, and Iceland, Turkey and West Germany the next year. It now has 47 member states, with Montenegro being the latest to join.
Article 4 of the Council of Europe Statute specifies that membership is open to any European State. This has been interpreted liberally from the beginning, when Turkey was admitted, to include transcontinental states, such as Georgia and Azerbaijan, and states that are geographically Asian but socio-politically European, such as Armenia and Cyprus.
Nearly all European states have acceded to the Council of Europe, with the exceptions of Belarus -human rights concerns including active use of the death penalty-, Kazakhstan -human rights concerns-, and the Vatican City (a theocracy), as well as some of the territories with limited recognition.
Besides the status as a full member, the Council of Europe has established other instruments for cooperation and participation of non-member states: observer, applicant, special guest, and partner for democracy.
Europe destiny and the future of the free world
are entirely in our hands.
Simone Veil
While Europe have fear to loose a garbage country as Spain in economical resources (resources of Catalonia), Catalonia will lose forever.
ReplyDeleteWhile exists European groups of politics (Socialist Group and Popular group), Catalonia will lose forever.
Catalonia lose forever.
From I have 18 years old always I think that in a future will success a Civil War between Catalonia and Spain.
I am not from CUP or PdCAT (these two Groups are pleased with a Civil War). Only rest one Group, ERC, that is my group a lot years ago (27 years).
But I don't see any solution.
Regards
PS: Sorry if I have any fault writing. I don't use traductors to write.
Historical and economical processes are unstoppable. It is difficult to see them when you are a part of one of them because you have not perspective. Europe is the continent that has changed its borders more times in a little time. It has not finished. It is only the beginning.
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot for your comments. They are always welcome. It is a pleasure to read them and think about them.
Best regards.