Lessons (To be) Learned: The Council of Europe and the Road Ahead: On Reinventing the Purpose of Being and Reforming the Administration of the Council of Europe (Democracy, Political Reforms & Civil Society) (Essay‪)‬

The author of this text has had the privilege to work for the Council of Europe for almost five years. The time spent left me with an invaluable insight into the operation of Europe's oldest organization, as the Council proudly, and rightly, labels itself. It is not only age that matters when one talks of the Strasbourg-based organization, but very much substance that is at the core of its potential to be a key player on the global stage. In the early 1990s, with the democratic change in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, an unprecedented opportunity arose for the Council of Europe to welcome those countries in the club, thus imposing the immensely rich legal portfolio of the organization dealing with such a wide array of expertise from language and minority rights to the combating of corruption and money laundering. The attraction of those standard-setting documents, to which Council of Europe members adhere to, was an appeal that brought all of the former Communist block countries to eventually join the organization. To many of those new members, meeting the criteria for membership of the Council of Europe, crucially such as being a functional democracy, was the precursor for the lengthy path ahead towards joining the European Union. The wealth of its legal foundations and width of its membership was and remains to be the biggest asset of the Council. Of course, the end of the bipolar world also meant a necessity for an overall reorganization of the entire global multilateral setting. This drew the Council of Europe, or arguably, more it meant other organizations drawing them, closer or even to the brink of an overlap of competencies. One organization was at the forefront of venturing into 'Council of Europe territory', when it comes to the expansion of its scope of operation, namely the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (the OSCE). The OSCE, or initially the Conference of the same name, was a process, later institutionalized, out of the Helsinki Accords, which were a landmark document mapping human rights at the core of the international equilibrium, to which, then remarkably for the first time the Soviet Union also signed up to, which eventually led to its demise. However, when the Conference received its institutional form through the Organization for Security and Cooperation, the Vienna-based entity was originally regarded as to mostly deal with the 'hard power' aspect of the east-west relationship, whilst the Council of Europe remained the sole European organization that not only had the wealth of detailed standard-setting conventions and similar legal framework documents, but also it had developed a pool of experts, expertise, and case-law (through its European Court of Human Rights) in all the variety of competences that the organization has under its umbrella.