Parliamentary Assembly

Draft opinion

1At the time of its 70th anniversary, the Council of Europe and its Parliamentary Assembly have been taken hostage by a member State that refuses to pay its annual contribution since 1 July 2017. The preparation of the Assembly’s opinion on the budget and priorities for the biennium 2020-2021 is now taking place in an extraordinary context. In face of the current financial crisis, it is regrettable that the Parliamentary Assembly has no budgetary powers. The Assembly therefore reiterates its request for a better institutional balance between the Council of Europe bodies in this field. The Assembly recalls that the Council of Europe is an international organisation of a political nature, without an economic or gainful aim, set up by sovereign States. The Council of Europe relies for its funding on contributions by its member States.

2The Assembly believes that the budgetary pressure being exerted on the Council of Europe by a member State is posing a serious risk that could destabilise the Organisation and deprive it of the resources needed to provide all its member and partner States with the responses enabling them to take up the current challenges and combat the current negative trends.

3The Assembly is aware that the internal political context is unfavourable, on account of the attitude of the Russian Federation, which, in using the budget as leverage to achieve its ends, is plunging the Council of Europe into the most serious budgetary crisis in its history and will thereby force the Organisation to take decisions that are potentially irreversible and could weaken it at the very time when it is celebrating its 70th anniversary.

4The Assembly believes that the strategic choices of recent years, which have given precedence to assistance and co-operation programmes for certain countries and to certain thematic areas of action, funded almost solely by extra-budgetary resources, have ended up weakening the system of intergovernmental co-operation, which is financed mostly by the ordinary budget.

5The Assembly nevertheless still believes that it is this unique system of co-operation between the member States based on the development of common standards, with conventions as the main source of the Council of Europe acquis, which forms the Organisation’s raison d’être, as pointed out in its Recommendation 2114 (2017) on defending the acquis of the Council of Europe and Resolution 2277 (2019) “Role and mission of the Parliamentary Assembly: main challenges for the future”.

6For 70 years, the convention-based system of the Council of Europe has made a major contribution to improving the functioning of democratic institutions in Europe, developing the rule of law throughout Europe and protecting and promoting the rights of all European citizens. The Council of Europe remains one of the very few multilateral forums able to quickly draft international instruments on a broad range of issues, many of which are among the most innovative in the world, to meet challenges, respond to the concerns of European citizens and protect their fundamental rights.

7The Assembly provides vital input during the drafting process of these international instruments and in ensuring their efficient implementation. In many cases, it has identified the areas where a need for new standards exist. It is therefore important for the Assembly to reinforce this capacity to react rapidly and to support all stakeholders within the member States in implementing them in an efficient way.

8In this respect, the Assembly fully supports the initiatives taken by the Council of Europe on issues related to artificial intelligence, which occupies an increasingly important place in the functioning of our societies. It calls on the Committee of Ministers to further develop co-operation in this area by drawing up a new legal instrument establishing a framework for the development, design and application of artificial intelligence in accordance with the standards of the Council of Europe.

9The Assembly welcomes the fact that gender equality remains one of the top priorities of the Organisation and that the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (CETS No. 210) has become a global reference text. It supports the Council of Europe Gender Equality Strategy 2018-2023, which sets out priorities for action for the years ahead, including achieving gender mainstreaming in all policies and activities of the Organisation,

10The Assembly, referring to its Resolution 2271 (2019) and Recommendation 2150 (2019) on strengthening co-operation with the United Nations in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, welcomes the decision of the Committee of Ministers to continue focusing attention during the next biennium on this global Agenda, and calls for the enhancement of the Council of Europe’s contribution, including by providing support to its member States towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

11Since July 2017, the Council of Europe has been confronted with an unprecedented budgetary and financial situation linked to the voluntary lack of payment by one of its member States. In this context, the Assembly calls on the Secretary General and the Committee of Ministers to look for alternatives to the contingency plan of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe for a budget reduction of €32.4 million. In this regard, it recalls the idea put forward by its General Rapporteur on the Budget to study the feasibility of assigning the debt to a third party.

12The Assembly notes that this possibility exists at international level and has been used by various countries in the past. The assignment of international receivables and the international assignment of receivables are an established practice in international trade, governed by the United Nations Convention on the Assignment of Receivables in International Trade of 12 December 2001.

13The Assembly regrets that this alternative has not been studied and that a contingency plan has been drawn up to absorb the size of the debt left voluntarily by a member State (nearly 90 million euros at the end of 2019). Implementation of the plan will mean that a significant number of activities and whole areas of the work of the Council of Europe could disappear, some of them irretrievably, for member States. The human cost will also be very substantial, with a departure scheme for 250 people, or almost 10% of the Council of Europe’s staff, which the member States will have to pay for.

14The Assembly notes that the Programme and Budget 2020-2021, which is being considered in the face of the ongoing uncertainty around the payment of the Russian Federation’s obligatory contributions, nonetheless shows the willingness to promote an Organisation that is increasingly agile and confident in its know-how and expertise through reforms aimed at improving its processes and working procedures.

15In this context, the Assembly has taken note of the intention of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe to rationalise the programme of activities and to focus the activities on nine operational programmes with a coherent set of sub-programmes. This should lead to greater focus on the political priorities, improve synergies and diminish unnecessary duplication and will allow greater managerial flexibility to implement the administrative reform measures

16The Assembly also notes that the Council of Europe may have to part with staff members who have extensive knowledge and experience of the Council’s fields of action and will be hard to replace. The human resources policy pursued in recent years (with large-scale use of fixed-term contracts) undermines the transmission of the know-how and acquis of the Council of Europe since it excludes the preparation of a fresh generation of staff members.

17The Assembly therefore expects the Council of Europe to introduce a staff policy that is sufficiently attractive to retain good candidates and also offer them career development prospects, despite the current budgetary uncertainties. In this context, the new People Strategy 2019-2023, which has been the subject of a broad consultation process including staff at all levels, should make it possible to meet the needs of the Council of Europe while responding to the legitimate aspirations of its staff.

18The Assembly will agree to contribute its fair share to the collective efforts called for, provided that several conditions are met:

18.1all alternatives to cutting the Organisation’s budget are studied seriously;

18.2all entities and sectors of the Council of Europe contribute to the overall effort;

18.3the efforts asked of the Assembly do not jeopardise its ability to operate.

19The Assembly calls on member States to make a larger contribution to the funding of the Council of Europe. This echoes repeated calls made by the Assembly in several budgetary opinions and in Recommendation 1812 (2007) on the political dimension of the Council of Europe budget. In the latter, it called on the Committee of Ministers to review the method of calculating the scales of contributions to give greater weight to gross domestic product and to set minimum scales for member States’ contributions to cover at least the administrative cost of a judge at the European Court of Human Rights.

20The Assembly, referring to its Opinion 288 (2015) on the budget and priorities of the Council of Europe for the 2016-2017 biennium, stresses not only the importance of voluntary contributions but also the danger they may create concerning the financial balance of the Council of Europe. That is why the Assembly looks favourably on the idea of creating a fund to receive voluntary contributions for the ordinary budget, which represents the life blood of the Organisation. It hopes that such a fund will be set up rapidly.

21The Assembly believes that the minimum level contribution to the ordinary budget to be paid by a member State should be around €500 000, to cover the annual budgetary cost of a judge, an administrative officer and an assistant working full time, as well as the annual administrative expenses pertaining to their work and presence in Strasbourg. At present, a third of member States (16 out of 47) pay contributions to the ordinary budget that are lower than that amount. Yet they all have a judge elected to the Court.

22In Recommendation 2124 (2018) “Modification of the Assembly’s Rules of Procedure: the impact of the budgetary crisis on the list of working languages of the Assembly”, the Assembly suggested that the Committee of Ministers take several decisions of a budgetary and financial nature, in particular regarding the opening of an obligatory reserve account funded by all or a substantial share of the unspent balance recorded at the close of each financial year or biennium. This is a call which the Assembly has made repeatedly in opinions on the Council of Europe programme and budget (Opinions 268 (2008), 279 (2009) and 281 (2011) in particular).

23With reference to Opinion 294 (2017), the Assembly calls on the Committee of Ministers to return to real growth in the Council of Europe’s budget in order to enhance the Organisation’s operational capacity. In this connection, it greatly regrets that the request to return to zero real growth which the Secretary General made for the 2018-2019 biennium was turned down because of the refusal of two of the 47 States represented in the Committee of Ministers. As the Financial Regulations provide for the budget to be adopted by a two-thirds majority, the Assembly is surprised that the member States which support the return to zero real growth have not insisted further.

24The Assembly will proceed during its June 2019 part-session to the election of a new Secretary General of the Council of Europe to take up office on 1 October 2019 for a five-year term. The Assembly therefore calls on the Committee of Ministers to make a firm commitment to ensure real budget growth for the Council of Europe for five years or at least zero real growth to take account of inflation. It considers that such a decision would be a clear sign of support from the member States to the future Secretary General, giving the Organisation a more stable budgetary framework for the five years of his or her mandate.

25Finally, the Assembly welcomes the decision adopted by the Committee of Ministers at its 129th Session (Helsinki, 17 May 2019) on “A shared responsibility for democratic security in Europe – Ensuring respect for rights and obligations, principles, standards and values”, in which it recalls that “one of the fundamental obligations of member States is to pay their obligatory contributions to the Ordinary Budget, as provided by Article 38 of the Statute”. In this context, and referring to its Recommendation 2153 (2019), the Assembly calls again on “the Russian Federation, in accordance with its statutory obligations, to appoint a delegation to the Assembly and to resume obligatory payment of its contribution to the Organisation’s budget, failure of which may lead to the suspension of its representation rights in both statutory organs, should the Committee of Ministers decide to apply Article 9 of the Statute of the Council of Europe (ETS No. 1)”.