General policy of the Council of Europe

Doc. 8481

16 July 1999

General policy of the Council of Europe

Recommendation 1267 (1995)

Reply from the Committee of Ministers

adopted at the 676^th meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies (1-2 July 1999)

Following the interim reply it adopted in November 1995 to Parliamentary Assembly Recommendations 1267 (1995) and 1279 (1995) respectively concerning the general policy of the Council of Europe and the 1996 Intergovernmental Conference of the European Union, the Committee of Ministers wishes to supplement the final reply it made in September 1997 to Recommendation 1279 by the following considerations, which form its final reply to Recommendation 1267.

In focusing on the challenges posed to the Council of Europe by its enlargement (and more particularly the need to monitor compliance with the commitments made by the member States) and on the importance of co-operation between the Council of Europe, the European Union and the OSCE in a multi-institutional, variable-geometry European context, the Parliamentary Assembly is completely in tune with the concerns of the Committee of Ministers. These concerns have been expressed at the highest political level in the Final Declarations of the Vienna and Strasbourg Summits and, only recently, in the “Budapest Declaration for a Greater Europe without Dividing Lines”, which the Committee of Ministers adopted at its 104th Session (Budapest, 6-7 May 1999) on the occasion of the Council of Europe’s 50th anniversary.

Apart from giving an assurance that the honouring of the commitments made by member States, on the one hand, and co-operation with the European Union and the OSCE, on the other, are and will remain two of the fundamental priorities of the Council of Europe’s action today and in the future, the Committee of Ministers wishes to make the following points concerning more specific issues raised by the Parliamentary Assembly in Recommendation 1267:

i. as the Assembly is aware, the Committee of Ministers has established, under its Declaration of 10 November 1994 on compliance with commitments accepted by member States of the Council of Europe and in accordance with the “procedure for implementing the Declaration of 10 November 1994 on compliance with commitments accepted by member States of the Council of Europe” adopted on 20 April 1995, a procedure for monitoring member States’ honouring of their

commitments, based on a thematic, confidential, constructive and non-discriminatory dialogue within the Committee of Ministers and taking account of the Parliamentary Assembly’s monitoring procedures. Regular exchanges of views on the operation of the Committee of Ministers’ and the Parliamentary Assembly’s respective monitoring procedures are held in the Joint Committee (in this connection, the Committee of Ministers has just proposed that the next Joint Committee meeting, which will be held at the end of September 1999, should be devoted entirely to an exchange of views on the matter);

ii. the Parliamentary Assembly is involved in the preparation and monitoring of the assistance and co-operation programmes – Activities for Developing and Consolidating Democratic Stability (ADACS), to use the terminology recently adopted by the Committee of Ministers – in that it is invited to the planning meetings and details of the programmes are communicated to it immediately after their adoption. In addition, a new practice has recently been inaugurated with the Stability Programme for South-East Europe, on which an enlarged meeting was held on 4 June in the framework of the Committee of Ministers’ Rapporteur Group for Democratic Stability (GR-EDS), to which the Parliamentary Assembly was invited as a participant in its own right;

iii. the assistance and co-operation programmes have been significantly boosted since 1995, and the appropriations made for activities by the Council of Europe in this area have risen from 36 540 000 FF in 1995 to 75 755 057 FF in 1999. In this connection, particular reference should be made to the substantial growth in recent years in joint Council of Europe/European Union programmes, on which the European Commission contributed a total of 11 948 286 ecus between 1993 and 1998, including 4 804 206 for 1998 alone. Similarly, the recent trend towards linking the assistance and co-operation programmes to the results of the monitoring procedures concerning member States’ compliance with their commitments is fully in line with the Parliamentary Assembly’s wish that these programmes be targeted on the democratic reforms that are most urgent and most relevant to improving the protection of human rights;

iv. in keeping with the wishes expressed by the Assembly, the Committee of Ministers made a contribution to the preparatory work for the European Union’s 1996 Intergovernmental Conference by drawing up a document entitled “Place and role of the Council of Europe in European construction, with the prospect of the European Union’s 1996 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC)” (document CM(95)128 revised). This document was communicated to the Parliamentary Assembly and officially forwarded to the Chair of the group responsible for preparing for the Intergovernmental Conference, Mr Carlos Westendorp;

v. with regard to the proposal to associate the Parliamentary Assembly with all co-ordination meetings between the Council of Europe and the European Union, the OSCE and the United Nations, the Committee of Ministers shares the view that it is both useful and important to enable the Assembly to express its views prior to such co-ordination meetings and to be fully informed about their outcome. It nevertheless believes that this objective can be achieved through the ongoing and substantial dialogue between the two organs of the Council of Europe without the need to provide for formal participation by the Assembly in the meetings themselves. As these meetings are organised on a parity basis (quadripartite meetings with the European Union, “2+2” meetings with the OSCE, tripartite meetings with the United Nations and OSCE at Secretariat level), formal participation by the Parliamentary Assembly would pose practical difficulties of such a nature that a more pragmatic solution – involving appropriate strengthening of the dialogue between the Committee of Ministers and the Parliamentary Assembly if need be – seems much more preferable. The Committee of Ministers is, of course, willing to study any proposal from the Parliamentary Assembly in this connection.