PRESIDENT MARY McAleese has described the delay in appointing a new secretary general to the Council of Europe as “a bit of an embarrassment”.
The appointment has been been delayed following a stand-off over candidates between the council’s committee of ministers and the parliamentary assembly.
In Strasbourg yesterday, Mrs McAleese met the current secretary general Terry Davis.
“I do think it’s a bit embarrassment to everybody that they haven’t been able to move beyond the impasse,” she said. “It think it’s very important that there is a new secretary general. I think it’s very important that there is strong leadership here.”
The committee of ministers is the decision-making body of the council. The secretary general is usually drawn from the ranks of the 318-member parliamentary assembly, the deliberative body which includes eight Oireachtas representatives.
Four candidates were nominated by the governments of Norway, Poland, Hungary and Belgium for the position.
On April 23rd, a vote on candidates by the committee of ministers resulted in a short-list of two names: Thorbjorn Jagland of Norway and Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz of Poland. Both men are former prime ministers and are described as socialists.
A decision on the new appointee was due to have taken place on Monday but has been postponed, probably until the autumn.
An Irish member of the parliamentary assembly showed The Irish Times a printed invitation to a reception on Monday he had received from the Norwegian foreign minister “on the occasion of the election of the secretary general of the Council of Europe”.
Mrs McAleese described the Council of Europe as a very important body. “Forty-seven members sign up to this, much much broader than the EU. It takes in a massive constituency. It has phenomenal reach. It’s a miracle that it exists,” she said. “And so leadership here is really very important. I know that they are working very hard.”
Meanwhile, Mrs McAleese also visited the European Court of Human Rights yesterday. The court has been coming under increasing pressure in recent years to improve its efficiency because of a sharp rise in its caseload.
A measure aimed at improving the court’s work, Protocol 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights, has been ratified by all member states of the Council of Europe with the exception of Russia.
Mrs McAleese said: “Quality, coherence and speed of access to court judgments are essential to good governance”.