75 years of the Council of Europe

The 75th anniversary of the Council of Europe and the end of the mandate of its Secretary General, Marija Pejčinović Burić takes stock of her years at the Council. She is the guest of “Micro Européen”.

The Council of Europe is an international organization which brings together approximately 675 million nationals from 46 member states, through legal standards in the areas of protecting human rights, strengthening democracy, and rule of law in Europe.

THE Council of Europe celebrates its 75th anniversary. 1949, first parliamentary assembly, represented today by its secretary general, Marija Pejčinović Burić who is a Croatian, and who is finishing her term.

franceinfo: Marija Pejčinović Burić, 75 years of the Council of Europe, what results for these 75 years? Time has passed and time will continue to pass, is it better to work on the long term than on the short term?

Marija Pejčinović Burić: Absolutely, I think the 75 years show that it was a very good decision of our founding fathers in 1949, to have the Council of Europe after the two destructive world wars, to say to ourselves that we must never have this again, we must have peace in Europe. And to have peace in Europe, we must have a Council of Europe which will bring together all the democratic countries of Europe.

So we started at 10, today there are 46. And the flagship text of the Council of Europe’s action since the beginning is the European Convention on Human Rights, which was built from way to hold up the moral force of Europe, like a moral compass. And if we look at all these years that have passed, we can say that the Convention has done its job, that it is doing it now and that it will continue to do it.

It was designed to serve the different moments of economic, social and other Europe. So, it held up well and we are very proud to have the Convention, the European Court of Human Rights, and therefore, after the Convention, we drafted more than 100 texts of treaties and agreements, which in almost all areas of defense…

We must remember one thing, you are not the Commission, you are not the Parliament, you are not one of these Brussels institutions, you are the Council of Europe, the Council is in Strasbourg, it t’s very important to say this, because we must remember that the seat of the European Parliament is also in Strasbourg.

Marija Pejčinović Burić, vou have been Minister of Foreign Affairs in your country, Croatia; in this world which is completely upside down, things are really moving everywhere, do you still have confidence?

Yes, I still have confidence, because I believe we have strength. The Council of Europe has shown that it has strength. We have means, through the European Convention on Human Rights, but also through many other conventions. And in fact, to have confidence in the future, you have to work, so that the future is better than what we see now.

And for example, our foreign ministers recently here in Strasbourg adopted the new Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, the Rule of Law and Democracy. This is a first on a global level, and we hope to open it for signature soon, and it will be the very first on a global level. So we have to see how to take all the advantages that artificial intelligence brings us, but that this does not destroy the way we operate in Europe but also in the democratic world.

We also think about the future in the following way: “how to see human rights in climate change” which also poses big questions for the future. So I am positive because I believe that in all circumstances, during these 75 years, the Council of Europe has worked in Europe, and we have always found solutions for the future. The Council of Europe was among the first, for example, to work on the protection of privacy, on the protection of personal data. Afterwards, he was the first to work on cybercrime, now on artificial intelligence.

So yes, I am very confident in the Council of Europe. However, we must never, ever forget that nothing is acquired, everything can be destroyed very easily. So we must always work, we must always watch and above all watch over fundamental freedoms, human rights, the rule of law, because this is what makes life in Europe, but also in the world.