Warsaw, 13/05/2005 (Agence Europe) - Poland welcomes the third summit of the Council of Europe on 16 and 17 May in Warsaw - a summit convened to review the mandate of the organisation and its place in the institutional architecture of Europe.
The summit will begin on Monday with an opening speech by the Polish president before a first session devoted to European unity and values. The heads of state and government are expected to seize this opportunity to recall their attachment to human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The second session during the afternoon will make it possible to review the challenges facing European societies. At the end of the afternoon, the three new conventions on (1) counter-terrorism, (2) the trade in human beings and (3) money laundering (currently updating of the 1990 Convention) will be opened for signature. On Tuesday morning, a debate devoted to the European architecture will precede the adoption of a political declaration and an action plan. The summit will end late morning after the presidency of the Committee of Ministers has been transferred from Poland to Portugal.
The political declaration and the action plan accompanying it will determine the future mandate of the Council of Europe and priority work. The starting ambition was to rebalance the missions of the Council and to focus its action on what some ambassadors described as the “holy trinity”: human rights, democracy and rule of law. This request by member countries of the European Union nonetheless came up against resistance from some countries of Central and Eastern Europe that hope to conserve cooperation in fields as diverse as the environment or social cohesion. In non-EU member countries, the Council of Europe remains the only framework for cooperation at the present time. The activities conducted by the Council of Europe in the fields of education and culture should also keep a good place in so far as these policies can help the move toward democracy. The summit should not therefore bring about any real upheavals in the activities of the Council of Europe but rather reach a number of priorities and provide guidelines for reducing duplication with the other European organisations, the OSCE and the EU. But here, too, the text will remain cautious because of the fears expressed by Russia about the Council of Europe possibly being “instrumentalised” by the EU. The summit should nonetheless result in the creation of a forum for the future of democracy which will be responsible for reflecting not only on the weaknesses of the emergent democracies but also on the ways to remedy democratic crises and above all the phenomena experienced in western Europe of low citizen participation and loss of confidence. Following the memorandum from President Wildhaber, a new reflection on the future of the European Court of Human Rights should also be initiated.
With just a few exceptions, all the heads of state and government confirmed their participation. Those absent included the French president, Jacques Chirac, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the British and Danish Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister of Iceland, Halidor Asgrimmsson, and of Sweden, Goran Persson. The Italian president of the Council, Silvio Berlusconi, should be replaced by Gianfranco Fini. The European Commission will be represented by Benita Ferrero-Waldner.