“The Secretary General of the Council of Europe has received formal notification of the Russian Federation’s withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and information about its intention to denounce it”, announced Daniel Holtgen, spokesman of the Council of Europe, on Tuesday 15 March in Strasbourg.
It was 5.30 pm. Since the beginning of the morning, the Parliamentary Assembly, meeting in extraordinary session, had been debating the possibility of initiating the procedure for excluding Russia. The vote that was to follow this “historic day” was a foregone conclusion, with everyone counting on a majority in favour of a green light for the Committee of Ministers, which was to formalise its decision on Thursday.
Faced with this now unavoidable process, Moscow preferred to take everyone by storm and announced its own voluntary and assumed departure from the oldest pan-European organisation, founded in 1949 to defend the Rule of law, democracy and human rights.
An organisation whose “unifying potential has been destroyed by the NATO and EU countries, which see this organisation as a sole means of ideologically ensuring their military-political expansion” it is asserted in the Declaration published on Tuesday afternoon on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry announcing the official sending of the notification to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Marija Pejčinović Burić.
For the Kremlin, the “responsibility for the destruction of the common humanitarian and legal space on the continent” and Russia’s departure will be borne by those who “forced it to take this step”.
Clearly, Russia would rather walk out than be expelled by the Council of Europe, but refuses to be accused by its citizens of depriving them of the legal protection of the European Convention on Human Rights and its corresponding Court.
At this stage, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Foreign Affairs Ministers is considering continuing its sanctions procedure launched on 25 February by suspending Russia’s right of representation in all the organisation’s statutory bodies. According to sources within the executive, it would like the Council of Europe to take the political decision to exclude Russia from a “common European home where there is no room for the aggressor”, as stated in the text debated all day by the Parliamentary Assembly.
This debate continued after 5.30 p.m., without the parliamentarians having been informed of the Russian decision. When the information reached a Polish MP at about 6.30 pm, she announced it and commented with a sober “good, we don't want a war criminal here”. “Let’s not be distracted by these Russian manoeuvres”, said a British socialist, “whatever we can do, we must do”. The debate therefore continued until the vote which recorded the unanimous will of the assembly to see Russia excluded from the Council of Europe.
During this extraordinary session, the Ukrainian delegation was represented only by its nine female members, some of them accompanied by their children in the gallery, as their male colleagues had not been able to leave their country due to the ban on leaving the country imposed on men aged 18 to 60. Dressed, like her compatriots, in a traditional embroidered blouse, the head of the delegation, Mariia Melzentzeva, declared at the opening of the debates that the Ukrainian people, holed up in the cellars, would not see the vote that was going to take place, but that she would see it and that she wanted to see “the Russian flag lowered” on the square in front of the Council of Europe on the day when Russia’s departure would be made official.
That day will come sooner than she expected. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)