Parliamentary Assembly

President of the Parliamentary Assembly, Secretary General, ladies and gentlemen, and members of the Parliamentary Assembly, as has been pointed out, this year – in these very days – Austria is celebrating its 60th anniversary of joining the Council of Europe. I thank the former President, Ms Brasseur, for her kind invitation to come to the Council of Europe and address the Chamber, and for the opportunity to speak before this distinguished audience. I also thank you, Mr President, for your warm words of welcome.

The key topics of the Council of Europe – democracy, human rights, human dignity, the rule of law, constitutional loyalty and so on – are concepts that I have lived and breathed as a politician. Throughout my political career, they have been with me. My political life actually began approximately 50 years ago. In 1962, I began working for the National Council of Austria, which is the Austrian Parliament, as a legal expert. In 1971, for the very first time I was elected as a member of parliament in Austria. At the beginning of the 1980s for some time I was, in fact, a member of this Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

In April 1956, Austria joined the Council of Europe. I should perhaps add that only a few months later – in other words, in the autumn of 1956 – we experienced the shock of the crushing of the Hungarian revolution, with the concomitant influx of a great number of refugees into Austria. I remember it well. I was a student at the time and I worked in a camp in Traiskirchen where we welcomed refugees. I was very happy to be able to help the refugees and to help to take care of them as they came to Austria.

Right from the outset Austria has been very committed to the work of the Council of Europe. For Austria, the Council of Europe is a unique platform where we can work out new forms of inter-State co-operation at government and parliamentary level, and perfect them. The European Convention on Human Rights has become a crucial component of Austria’s constitutional order. Many of the landmark rulings handed down by Austrian courts can be traced back to the European Court of Human Rights and its rulings. In fact, I visited the Court just a few moments ago.

In April 2014, exactly two years ago, I had the opportunity to come before this august Assembly and say a few words. At the time, I spoke about important stages in the development of the Council of Europe. I will not reiterate what I said then. This time, if I may, I would like to devote my attention to a few topical points.

One topical point is very positive: the European Court of Human Rights has, over the course of the past few years, been able to reduce its considerable backlog of outstanding complaints. We also face another fact, however. Unfortunately, when it comes to respecting democratic standards and guaranteeing the liberties that are so essential for the development of a free civil society, we have to say that these phenomena are not exactly in fine fettle right now. In fact, in some of our member States, the Council of Europe is facing the danger of backsliding, for example on the undermining of a properly functioning constitutional jurisdiction.

Terror is not new in our history. In Europe, however, in the relatively calm years of reconstruction and recovery after the Second World War, we may have got the impression that terror and terrorism were phenomena that could be relegated to the past. This started to change in the 1970s with individual acts of terrorism and hijackings, the purpose of which were to draw attention to the struggle of radical groups of Palestinians. In Germany and in other European countries and cities, small and extremely determined left-wing radical groups tried to use terror and kidnappings to blackmail the States concerned. We believe we have turned the page on that particular phenomenon, but we now have a new phenomenon: a new form of terror.

The new form of terror cannot, of course, be equated with Islam and we cannot pin the blame for it on Muslims, generally speaking. It is novel in the sense that it seeks to cause a great degree of uncertainty and terror by arbitrarily killing as many people as possible, with lives cruelly snatched away. Unfortunately, the strategy is proving successful, and there have been the recent examples of the dreadful attacks in Paris, Istanbul and Brussels. Any sensible and decent-thinking human being will, of course, condemn those attacks most firmly. At the same time, however, we are struggling to come up with the right answers and the right preventive measures. We need to fight against this form of terrorism. That fight cannot take the form of police co-operation alone. We cannot create a police State either. The Council of Europe has developed new legal instruments. For example, the new additional protocol to the Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism addresses the subject of so-called foreign terrorist fighters. A lot still remains to be done, but our basic values must not be impinged upon in any way in the current context.

As I have already pointed out, I was here two years ago. That was the last time I visited the Council of Europe and I stood here before this Assembly. At the time, the Assembly was discussing the temporary suspension of the voting rights of members belonging to the Russian Federation’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly because of the Ukraine crisis and the situation in Crimea. The hope was that the crisis could be overcome swiftly. Today, two years down the road, nobody can claim that this problem has been resolved. There are, if I may say so, some glimmers of hope. The Minsk talks have been a positive development. They have yielded some results, or at least partial results. The extent of the confrontation has been curtailed and there is now a lower number of casualties. The basic root of the problem is still unresolved, so the situation is still far from satisfactory – and indeed dangerous.

Last week, I visited Moscow as part of an official mission. I had the opportunity to talk, at quite some length, with President Putin. Foreign Minister Lavrov was also present at the talks. The situation in Ukraine was one of the key topics addressed during the conversation. If I may share my impression with you, it is that Russia can hardly be satisfied with the sanctions and the cooling of its relationship with Europe. At the same time, however, Russia is not – or not yet – prepared to pay a reasonable price for a solution. On the other side, Ukraine must be even more dissatisfied with the present state of affairs, yet it is not prepared to, or is not in a position to, pay a reasonable price to reach a solution. By that I mean the exact implementation of the content and chronology of the Minsk agreements, and the ability to find a workable arrangement of self-government.

All parties concerned must understand that there is a correlation between the implementation of the Minsk agreements and an end to sanctions or at least the gradual lifting of sanctions. Austria recognises this fact and we understand this state of affairs. We have adhered to the sanctions and we have been very loyal vis-à-vis the European Union when it comes to the system that has been established. From an Austrian perspective, we believe that this is an incentive to work even harder towards the implementation of the Minsk agreements. I very much hope that all parties understand that.

For me, it remains a basic premise that as far as Europe and Russia are concerned it is good if we have good relations. I would also argue that it would be bad for Europe and Russia if our relationship was bad. In order to improve relations, we need to understand the position of the other side. We need to understand the other. Russia needs to understand what it is that exercises its partners in Europe – what we are concerned about. Conversely, Europe must understand what it is that Russia is concerned about and has been concerned about over the past 25 years since 1991. My personal view – this really is just a personal comment, if I may – is that a policy that would lead us, within the foreseeable future, to Ukraine’s accession to NATO is one that, for Europe, Ukraine and Russia, would ultimately bring more disadvantages than advantages.

The key problem facing Europe is without doubt the crisis in migration and the stream of refugees. Last year more than 1 million people crossed the European Union’s external borders as migrants or refugees and sought protection in European States. Austria was much affected by this phenomenon, and one country alone cannot resolve this crisis: international co-operation and co-ordination must be at the top of the European agenda.

We stand by the right to asylum, but if our common European asylum policy fails individual States or groups of States will be forced to take counter measures at the national level. Over the past six or seven months we have witnessed in many European countries a considerable backlash in public opinion and attitudes to refugees. We must avoid the topic of refugees becoming a fuel, or indeed dynamite, deployed by right wing extremist organisations, by xenophobes or by those who hold nationalist views.

It cannot be denied that there have always been such attitudes. People who belong to another nationality, to another religion, to another faith or who have a different colour skin unfortunately often face general mistrust, but to counter that we need the declaration on human rights and to refer to human dignity – an inalienable right. We can also refer to the exhortations of His Holiness the Pope and to our commitment to solidarity. We can also refer to other world leaders, such as the Cardinal of Vienna, Dr Schönborn, who has spoken of the right to asylum as a sacred right, and to the wonderful dedication and commitment of swathes of our civil societies. That commitment was experienced in Austria after the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and in 1968 with the crushing of the Prague Spring. More recently, solidarity has stood the test of time.

Two factors have unfortunately contributed to a change in attitudes: the quantative factor – the sudden in increase in numbers, with its concomitant consequences – and the sentiment of inequality, of an unfair burden-sharing system. Germany, Sweden, Greece and Italy are well placed to give us their figures and perspective. From the Austrian perspective, I can say that our country has a population of 8.5 million and that almost 800 000 refugees entered our country in the second half of 2015. Most of them went on to Germany but nevertheless that could not become a permanent state of affairs, which is why I ask for your understanding. Austria received 88 000 asylum applications. That corresponds to about 1% of its population and was higher than the number of births.

That is difficult to explain to our constituents – to our people – when European Union figures show that the total number of asylum applications in 23 member States did not correspond to 0.5% of the total population and that in 15 member States the figure was less than 0.1%. I therefore ask you to understand the measures taken by the Austrian Federal Government to settle the problem and its consequences – including the integration of refugees – for schools, employment and so on. We have tried to resolve the issue in an orderly fashion. We have taken measures including the establishment of an approximate reference value, namely 37 500 asylum applications for 2016. That figure still corresponds to 0.5% of the population and means that Austria is well above the average applied in the European Union as a whole.

With good control of the European Union’s external borders we will not have to pay so much attention to internal borders. The Brenner border is a sensitive one, for historical, political, psychological and economic reasons. With an unabated influx of refugees Austria will have to address the issue of border checks. Similarly, Germany’s Wasserberg border is sensitive, as is the border between Italy and France around Nice. It is not, however, appropriate to speak of closing our borders or of locking them and sealing them, and I should not want to speak in such terms. Austria cannot and will not seal itself from Germany or any other country, but we must know how many people are crossing our borders and how we can integrate them. We do not want to turn back the wheel of history.

Austria will next year chair the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), for which it has made good preparations, and our experience of holding the chairmanship of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers in 2013-14 will be invaluable.

I should like to conclude with a few personal comments. At the beginning of my address I mentioned the fact that I began to work for the Austrian Parliament in the early 1960s. In the mid-1970s I became leader of the Social Democratic Party in Austria. I then left the parliament for a couple of years and became federal minister for science and research. For 12 years I was Speaker of the Austrian National Council and in 2004 I was elected President of Austria, with 51% of the vote. In 2010 I was re-elected with the support of 79.3% of the votes cast. This Sunday we shall organise the first round of elections for a new Austrian President. I think I am safe in saying that none of the candidates – five male candidates and one female candidate – will receive more than 50% of the votes in the first round. On 22 May 2016, therefore, we shall have a run-off between the two highest scoring candidates, and on 8 July 2016 I shall hand over my responsibilities to my successor – him or her.

I look back on my lengthy career in politics with a great deal of joy and gratitude, and over the next few weeks I shall bid farewell to a number of very dear friends. I am delighted to be here with you today following Madam Brasseur’s invitation and to have the opportunity to say goodbye to the distinguished Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I thank you for your attention and wish you all the best for the future.