Secretary General of the Council of Europe since September 2019, Croatian Marija Pejčinović Burić has devoted her first annual report to ‘Multilateralism 2020’, thus breaking with a format traditionally devoted to the ‘Fitness check of our democracies’, a theme she will take up again in 2021, but in a different presentation, she announced.
In this 2020 edition, the Secretary General underlines that the ‘stress test’ represented by the Covid-19 crisis proved that the Council of Europe is able to play its essential role in the defence of human rights, even in extreme circumstances. From the outset, she said at a press conference, it has been organised to provide Member States with guidelines and ‘toolkits’ to enable them to be effective in health matters while meeting their obligations.
The second part of the report, devoted to the Council of Europe’s response to the pandemic, details the actions taken by all departments of an organisation in which more than 80% of staff worked remotely during the lockdown and which organised more than 450 daily videoconferences involving some 2,000 internal and external participants.
The Council of Europe had to adapt to the pandemic, the Secretary General said, but while the crisis had hampered the implementation of the reform, the main lines of which had been defined at the May 2019 Ministerial Conference in Helsinki, it had also accelerated the implementation of certain measures envisaged, such as the use of teleworking and digital collaboration.
“This is an opportunity for the Council of Europe to show the way in which multilateral organisations can adopt cutting-edge methods and deliver more for our Member States at no extra-cost”, points out Marija Pejčinović Burić.
According to her, the Strasbourg-based organisation has demonstrated its effectiveness and “should be unabashed in taking the lead in defending multilateralism against those who would undermine it along with our common standards”.
An “effective multilateralism” that it cannot conceive of without close collaboration with the European Union (the largest voluntary contributor to the Council of Europe) and other international organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). “Working together we can both achieve more and avoid duplication”, she says.
See the report: https://bit.ly/3fpVJRO (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)