2.03.2010

OFFICIAL ADDRESS BY MR MEVLÜT ÇAVUŞOĞLU, PRESIDENT OF THE PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY,

TO THE MEMBERS OF THE PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY

OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

(Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tuesday 2 March 2010, 11.00 a.m.)

Dear Speakers, Ladies and Gentlemen, friends,

This is my first address as President of the Parliamentary Assembly to a parliament of one of its member states. For me, this is a great honour, but also a deeply symbolic event. As you certainly know (since I’ve known many of you for a long time!), as one of the co-Rapporteurs of the Monitoring Committee I have been following Bosnia and Herzegovina’s progress towards fulfilling its commitments and obligations to the Council of Europe since 2006.

The Council of Europe for me is like a big family, where we share our concerns and our achievements, and try to help each other through moral support and expert advice. This is why, although the Monitoring Rapporteurs must remain neutral and objective in their assessment, we nevertheless feel huge personal satisfaction at each achievement and success of the country and are saddened when obstacles arise on the path of progress.

This is also why, in my role as President of the Assembly of 47 countries of Europe, I have vowed that our efforts to promote democracy and human rights would be even more than ever before a common endeavour.

“A common endeavour” is the other name for the “raison d’être” of the Council of Europe. There is no such thing as a specific country, on the one side, and the abstract notion of international community - teaching lessons and trying to impose solutions - on the other side. Each country in Europe has its own legacy of the past; its own set of problems in the present; and its own vision of the future. None of us is perfect. But the whole logic of European integration has been precisely that: of coming together, imperfect as we are, but being able to talk, share our joys and our concerns, and being able to come up with solutions which allow us to stand up to a complex world.

In my address, I shall briefly share with you my vision for a common Europe and I shall then dwell on the role of Bosnia and Herzegovina in it.

After the fall of the Berlin wall, the European integration followed a steady and logical path for a while. The Council of Europe gradually integrated all the countries of the Continent (with the exception of Belarus) on the basis of shared values and principles. At the same time, the European Union moved towards deepening the integration of those countries which were both willing and able to respond to the challenges of a common market and of an ever increasing number of supranational powers and decision-making processes.

In both cases, these paths have come to a crossroads, where we need to stand back, look around and decide in which direction to move next. In the Council of Europe, the greatest challenge is to make sure that the European Convention on Human Rights continues to play its vital role of an efficient mechanism for the protection of the values and principles we stand for. In this respect, the forthcoming entry into force of Protocol 14, following Russia’s ratification, represents a great hope and challenge. I have just come back from the conference in Interlaken on the future of the Court. I am glad that the participating Ministers committed themselves to strengthening the Strasbourg supervisory mechanism. But what is more important, they also recognised that the primary responsibility for the protection of human rights should be shifted back to national legal systems and practices.

The integration process in the EU, on the other hand, has become increasingly controversial; over the last years we witnessed referenda in different countries which have opposed further integration; we witnessed the failure of the European Constitution and we see the many uncertainties about how operational the Lisbon Treaty will be in real terms. All this has been combined with the “enlargement fatigue”, from which the countries in the Balkans have been the first to suffer.

Both the Council of Europe and EU were re-born and re-created in the Big Bang caused by the fall of communism. However, both organisations now have to face challenges of an entirely different nature. Why? Because the greatest shake-ups that have occurred since the fall of the Berlin wall have been not on a European, but on a global scale. To name just the most outstanding ones: international terrorism, the global financial and economic crisis and global warming. On a daily basis, Europe has also been confronted with all the “side effects” of these global upheavals and which also go beyond national borders – migration, xenophobia and intolerance, poverty, unemployment, social exclusion, or mass natural disasters leaving thousands of people homeless and costing millions to the state budgets.

None of these problems has met an unanimous response in Europe. On the contrary. Every day we witness deep divisions amongst Europeans, both at national level and between countries, over the whole panoply of related questions: how to tackle the flow of irregular immigrants; how much regulation should be imposed to the banks; how to reduce budget deficits; how far to commit ourselves in the climate change negotiations; how to deal with countries such as Afghanistan or Iran; how to ensure steady and reliable energy provision, at the lowest cost for our budgets and for the environment.

These questions are not only complex; they are unprecedented because they are global. Yet having different, even opposing points of view on how to tackle them is a healthy part of a democratic process. The problem is not in the divergences and differences; the real problem comes if we are unable to reconcile them and to come up with a unified position which would best defend our interests.

I am saying this in the context of European integration, but the same logic will apply in a minute, when we come to the challenges in your country.

One thing is sure, division has never worked in the interest of Europe. And this reality will become even more relevant every day. The balance of power in the world is changing and some of the new powers that are emerging not only possess economic might, but sometimes defend values which are not necessarily those that Europe has fought so hard to defend and promote over the last 60 years.

Here, again, I would like to draw a parallel with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This is a country that epitomises the dialectic, the controversies and the challenges of Europe. Over the past years the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina have had to learn to heal the wounds of the war and to live together facing the future. So today your country has to face both the controversies of the global world and its own controversies.

Clearly this is not an easy task. It becomes even more difficult when all these complexities have to be tackled within state structures and institutions which were designed in a different context and need reform in order to function properly. I wish to praise the courage of those politicians and institutions who have managed to move things forward in these circumstances and bring about positive changes. For instance, the defence reform, the painful but successful establishment of the State Ombudsperson’s Office, or the fact that through the so-called “Prud process” the first constitutional amendment on Brcko was adopted in 2009. This means that the stakeholders can change the constitution when they want to!

There have also been setbacks in the process of reforms. Most recently, the House of Representatives rejected the Law on the Census. We are very much concerned about this. The position of the Assembly and the Council of Europe is clear - the census must take place in 2011. Otherwise Bosnia and Herzegovina will be aggain lagging behind. I call upon all of you to urgently adopt the Law on Census in order to pilot it in 2010 and hold a census in 2011, together with your European neighbours.

When back in 2006 the “April package” failed to be adopted, it was difficult to imagine how the country would continue to function for another 4 years with the same constitutional set-up. 4 years looked like too long a time. But also looked like enough time for things to change. Well, dear friends, those 4 years have passed. On the positive side, the state has continued to function, although the progress could have been greater. At this stage, I prefer not to think of the negative side. There are still two months until the final date after which no changes can be made and the October elections risk repeating the same scenario.

Can 2 months change what has not been achieved in 4 years? Our Assembly believes so. In the Resolution that was adopted back in 2008 and then reiterated in the Resolution adopted during last January part-session, it called on all political forces to engage in a dialogue as well as draft and adopt a new constitution before the October elections. What can be achieved now is at least to change the constitutional provisions regulating the election to the Presidency and to the House of Peoples, on the understanding that a wider constitutional reform is needed and that work on it will have to carry on after the elections.

Already in 2005 the Venice Commission provided a comprehensive set of good proposals and stands always ready to offer the highest quality, politically neutral, expert advice. There has also been a number of positive, domestic and international initiatives. So the substance is there. All we need now is political will. And we also need the understanding that this is a negotiation process in which there are no winners and losers. If an agreement is reached, everybody will benefit. If it fails, everybody will lose. The short-term political dividends would look petty in comparison to the blow that the national interest of Bosnia and Herzegovina will suffer, especially with respect to its further Euro-integration.

Today and tomorrow I am meeting with the leaders of all the main political parties and I am relying on these meetings to understand better what kind of common positions can be reached and whether the Assembly can assist in some way this process. Before our April session, the Rapporteurs of the Monitoring Committee will also come with the same task and evaluate whether the Assembly needs to put the issue on the agenda of its April part-session.

Of course, you know better than any of us what the stakes of the constitutional reform are: making your democratic institutions stronger and more efficient; speeding up reforms, particularly in the field of the judiciary, the local government, human rights and media pluralism; Euro-integration. But I would add to this also a strong moral and legal dimension, which stems from the recent ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. If the institutions which result from the October elections are deemed in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, added to all the existing difficulties of their current functioning will be another one: that of their legitimacy. And this will not help anybody.

This is why we welcome the initiative of your Parliamentary Assembly to task the Council of Ministers to come up with an Action Plan on the execution of the judgement of the Court. We look forward to seeing what the Action Plan will contain and we do hope that it will indeed allow consitutional amendments to be adopted before May.

I am aware that with such a high concentration of difficult problems, political tensions and inflammatory rhetoric are on the rise and I deeply regret it because it does nothing to solve the problems. Some have even found a solution which they think is the easiest and the wisest. They say: let everybody go their own way and do as much as they are capable of doing. I am afraid the common wisdom goes against this kind of logic. If I started my address to you with “the global picture” of Europe and the world, it is precisely in order to underline that times in the world, and in Europe, have changed for good. There is no longer room for narrow, local political experiments based on ethnic lines. The priorities of today are different, and they go way beyond ethnic and ideological criteria. At present, we need to build modern, prosperous societies, with functioning economies and strong social safety networks; we need to preserve everything that we have achieved over the last 60 years in terms of peace, democracy, rule of law and human rights. We need to educate our children in a way which makes them real citizens of a global world and capable of taking their future into their own hands.

Everything that Bosnia and Herzegovina has achieved over the past years has been hard-earned. All the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, be it “constituent peoples” or “others” have participated in it in one way or another. This is your common legacy. You should cherish it and build on it. It is time that this wonderful country takes its destiny into its own hands. Our Assembly and, through it all the citizens of Europe that it represents, believe that you can and should do it. I hope that you believe in this too.

Thank you.