Council of Europe has truly come of age

Jim Mitchell TD admits freely that before he set off to become an Irish representative on the 40-member-state Council of Europe he had little sense of what this venerable body did. He was soon put right, and is now a fervent advocate of the council and of a more consistent approach by Ireland to its work.

Not that, mea culpa, such an absence of awareness does not extend even to such well-informed institutions as this paper - this correspondent's occasional missives on the subject have to be footnoted "this is nothing to do with the European Union" if a headline is not to appear referring to the EU.

Such confusion would be unlikely in the newly emerging democracies of central and eastern Europe where the council's ground-breaking role consolidating democratic institutions is far better known and understood.

Brendan Daly TD, who succeeded Mr Mitchell as the leader of the Irish parliamentary delegation, is determined that the 50th anniversary celebrations of the council, which start next week in Strasbourg, and the looming Irish Presidency in November, will be opportunities to publicise the council's work in Ireland.

When in May 1949 the statutes of the new council were signed in London, Ireland was one of the 10 founding member-states. The signature was one of the first foreign policy acts of the State after the passage of the Republic of Ireland Act.

Ireland was also the first state to agree to the unconditional application of the writ of the council's greatest institutional achievement, the European Court of Human Rights, whose first case against a member-state was Lawless v Ireland (on administrative detention).

At the time of our last presidency of the committee of ministers in 1986, the council had only some 20 members - now it has 40, 41 next week when Georgia joins. But the transformation is more than just quantitative. The council has truly come of age as a pan-European body with both the accession of states from central and eastern Europe, including Russia, and the transition of the court to a full-time body a couple of months ago.

The huge challenges facing the organisation are reflected in the decision, at last, of the Government to appoint our first full-time Ambassador, Mr Justin Harmon.

He reflects with some awe on the tasks the Presidency must help to steer through - from new applications from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Armenia and Azerbaijan, to a major internal reform programme involving the council structures and its 1,500 staff to help prioritise its work, to negotiations on the council's frozen £120 million annual budget for the post-2000 period, to the beefing-up of the capacity of the court to handle the thousands of petitions now beginning to flood in from the new eastern member-states . . .

Externally, the council has stepped up its work in the Balkans. In recent years it has spent up to 10 per cent of its budget working in eastern Europe to assist democratisation. In large measure the new Albanian constitution was written with Strasbourg's help, as was the reform of Georgian institutions, and it has driven far-reaching reforms of the Russian judicial system.

Since 1995 the council has provided expertise and training in institution-building and assistance for civic NGOs in Bosnia and other Balkan countries, supporting the opposition media in Serbia and Croatia, and monitoring human rights, until recently, in Kosovo.

Ireland will have its own priorities too, across the huge range of activities in which the council has become involved, from bio-ethics to the rights of children and culture. Preparations for the Presidency have involved 10 Government Departments.

The Minister for Tourism and Sport, Dr McDaid, is particularly keen to see work advanced on doping in sport.

And Tony Gregory TD, an alternate member of the council, has been involved in its sub-committee on drugs. He hopes that the Presidency will give a new impetus to the struggle to agree a common approach at European level through the "Pompidou Group", a council offshoot which has been co-ordinating pan-European approaches to the issue.

Ireland will also be signing up, as part of the Belfast Agreement, to the Convention on the Treatment of National Minorities, with its requirement of detailed reporting on how the convention is being implemented.

As well as a special stamp, there will be meetings in Dublin using both the Presidency and the anniversary to highlight the council's work. And next week four young people from Ireland will go out to Strasbourg to join hundreds of others to see the Parliamentary Assembly at work.

Mr Mitchell wants to see more work done to establish formal links between the council and the EU, even arguing that the assembly could provide a form of upper house for the European Parliament, reflecting the need for an EU voice for both the aspirations of member-states' national parliamentarians and those of countries hoping to accede eventually to the EU.

The idea is worth considering, reflecting as it does the growing awareness in Europe of the complementary rather than competing role of each of the great institutions, whether EU, Council of Europe, OSCE or NATO.

Yet to see the Council of Europe, as some have suggested, as a sort of ante-chamber to the EU is perhaps to underplay its role. The standards-setting role on human rights and the rule of law played by the Council of Europe, not only in the east but very close to home, is unique and one of the very cornerstones of European democracy.