Contemporary European civilisation is built on many foundations. Among the most important of them is the Council of Europe.
It is the continent's oldest international political organisation, with a membership of 46 states, whose third summit meeting since 1949 concluded in Warsaw yesterday. Its secretary general, Terry Davis, asked the summit bluntly: "What is the purpose of the Council of Europe?"
In the declaration and action plan adopted and in speeches from national leaders he received a clear and constructive answer. The Council will remain a legal guarantor of human rights, democracy and due legal process working more closely with its member nations to ensure these values are respected.
Much of the Council's work has been done behind the scenes, a culture built up partly because it was marginalised by the cold war and the emergence of the separate, much smaller and more integrated European Communities in the 1950s. That changed after the Berlin Wall fell, when the values enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights agreed by all the Council of Europe's members in 1953 were strongly reactivated.
So much so, indeed, that one of the principal tasks facing the summit was how to deal with the 80,000 or so outstanding cases listed for hearing at the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights. They are to be filtered by a team of lawyers, which should reduce the numbers. But it will be important to preserve the direct access individual citizens have to the court once they exhaust legal options in their own countries.
The summit also agreed to more legal training and other measures to streamline its procedures. There have been many landmark Strasbourg judgments which have changed national laws, including Ireland's ban on homosexual acts and Turkey's law on police detentions. The EU's constitutional treaty incorporates the convention, which will strengthen its remit if the treaty is ratified this year and next.
The council will continue its human rights monitoring, which has been most effective in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Russia. It is to reinforce its work on democratic participation and equality between men and women, undertaken with national parliamentarians and civil society groups. Media freedom and freedom of expression are also part of its agenda. There will be initiatives on terrorism, corruption and organised crime maladies which plague many of its newly independent members.
The Council of Europe has done valuable work over the years on inter-cultural dialogue, another sphere of activity that will be reinforced in future. This is especially worthwhile, given the tensions arising from cultural conflicts between religious and ethnic groups. It is easy but quite mistaken to take this work for granted. Without it the civility on which Europe prides itself would be much more problematic.