Addressing the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on Wednesday 4 March, the Secretary General, Alain Berset, spoke to representatives of the organisation’s foreign ministers and stressed the importance of a European security architecture “within a stable and permanent institutional framework - one capable of overcoming fragmented, ad hoc responses and preventing paralysis”.
A request was made to the Committee of Ministers that the Secretary General announced on 1 March in his Statement on the outbreak of the crisis in Iran and the Middle East, and which comes after conversations he held with the leaders of states bordering the region, including the President of Cyprus, Níkos Christodoulides, the Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pachinian, the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, and the Moldovan Foreign Minister, Mihail Popșoi.
An exchange with the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hakan Fidan, is also planned.
Faced with the breakdown of the international order that is now violently underway, he calls for a “bold, clear and values-based vision for Europe as a whole”.
“We face a fundamental choice”, he insisted: “Do we want to continue to react to crises caused by others? Or do we organise our collective security in a permanent framework that allows us to anticipate and act together?”
For Alain Berset, “the Council of Europe is the only existing organisation with the geographical scope, historical legitimacy and legal coherence to fulfil this function”.
The Council of Europe has undertaken a reform to strengthen its capacity for action, he added, before announcing that consultations with the Member States would be undertaken in the coming weeks to define the way forward. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)