The Council of Europe (CoE; French: Conseil de l'Europe, CdE) is an international organisation which aims to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe. Founded in 1949, it is Europe's oldest intergovernmental organisation with the largest number of Member States, representing 46 European member states. The council is an official United Nations observer. The headquarters of the Council of Europe, as well as the European Court of Human Rights – one of its main bodies – are situated in Strasbourg, France. Field offices are spread in over 16 countries, including in Africa, namely Morocco and Tunisia. The Council uses English and French as its two official languages. The Committee of Ministers, the PACE, and the Congress of the Council of Europe also use German and Italian for some of their work. The council's two statutory bodies are the Committee of Ministers, which comprises the foreign ministers of each member state, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which is composed of members of the national parliaments of each member state. The Commissioner for Human Rights is an institution within the Council of Europe, mandated to promote awareness of and respect for human rights within the member states. The secretary general presides over the secretariat of the organisation. Other major CoE bodies include the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare (EDQM) and the European Audiovisual Observatory. The 1949 Statute of the Council of Europe established the organization, initially among Western European states. Portugal and Spain joined in 1976 and 1977 via the Portuguese and Spanish transitions to democracies. Following the revolutions of 1989 and dissolution of the Soviet Union, all post-Warsaw Pact and post-Yugoslav states countries joined (except Kosovo), as well as all European post-Soviet states except Belarus and Kazakhstan. Russia became the first country expelled from the Council, following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Unlike the EU, the Council of Europe cannot make binding laws; however, the council has produced a number of international standards and treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which also gave birth to one of its best-known body – the European Court of Human Rights, which rules on alleged violations of the ECHR. If the Court finds a violation, its judgments are legally binding on the state concerned – and the state may have to pay compensation or change its laws or practices. Provisions from the convention are incorporated in domestic law in many participating countries.
The organisation is distinct from the European Union (EU), although people sometimes confuse the two organisations – partly because the EU has adopted the original European flag, designed for the Council of Europe in 1955, as well as the European anthem. No country has ever joined the EU without first belonging to the Council of Europe, and it has been said that to see these interstate institutions of post-war Europe as clearly separate is "profoundly misleading". It operates with an annual ordinary budget of 656 million euros.
In a speech in 1929, French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand floated the idea of an organisation which would gather European nations together in a "federal union" to resolve common problems. The United Kingdom's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill first publicly suggested the creation of a "Council of Europe" in a BBC radio broadcast on 21 March 1943, while the Second World War was still raging. In his own words, he tried to "peer through the mists of the future to the end of the war", and think about how to rebuild and maintain peace on a shattered continent. Given that Europe had been at the origin of two world wars, the creation of such a body would be, he suggested, "a stupendous business". He returned to the idea during a well-known speech at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946, throwing the full weight of his considerable post-war prestige behind it.
Additionally, there were also many other statesmen and politicians across the continent, many of them members of the European Movement, who were quietly working towards the creation of the council. Some regarded it as a guarantee that the horrors of war – or the human rights violations of the Nazi regime – could never again be visited on the continent, others came to see it as a "club of democracies", built around a set of common values that could stand as a bulwark against totalitarian states belonging to the Eastern Bloc. Others again saw it as a nascent "United States of Europe", the resonant phrase that Churchill had reached for at Zurich in 1946.
The future structure of the Council of Europe was discussed at the Congress of Europe, which brought together several hundred leading politicians, government representatives and members of civil society in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1948. Responding to the conclusions of the Congress of Europe, the Consultative Council of the Treaty of Brussels convened a Committee for the Study of European Unity, which met eight times from November 1948 to January 1949 to draw up the blueprint of a new broad-based European organisation.
There were two competing schools of thought: some favoured a classical international organisation with representatives of governments, while others preferred a political forum with parliamentarians. Both approaches were finally combined through the creation of a Committee of Ministers (in which governments were represented) and a Consultative Assembly (in which parliaments were represented), the two main bodies mentioned in the Statute of the Council of Europe. This dual intergovernmental and inter-parliamentary structure was later copied for the European Communities, NATO and OSCE.
The Council of Europe was signed into existence on 5 May 1949 by the Treaty of London, the organisation's founding Statute which set out the three basic values that should guide its work: democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It was signed in London on that day by ten states: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom, though Turkey and Greece joined three months later. On 10 August 1949, 100 members of the council's Consultative Assembly, parliamentarians drawn from the twelve member nations, met in Strasbourg for its first plenary session, held over 18 sittings and lasting nearly a month. They debated how to reconcile and reconstruct a continent still reeling from war, yet already facing a new East–West divide, launched the radical concept of a trans-national court to protect the basic human rights of every citizen, and took the first steps in a process that would eventually lead to the creation of an offshoot organisation, the European Union.
In August 1949, Paul-Henri Spaak resigned as Belgium's foreign minister in order to be elected as the first president of the assembly. Behind the scenes, he too had been quietly working towards the creation of the council, and played a key role in steering its early work. However, in December 1951, after nearly three years in the role, Spaak resigned in disappointment after the Assembly rejected proposals for a "European political authority". Convinced that the Council of Europe was never going to be in a position to achieve his long-term goal of a unified Europe, he soon tried again in a new and more promising format, based this time on economic integration, becoming one of the founders of the European Union.
During the early years of the Council of Europe, its founders drafted what was to become the European Convention on Human Rights, a charter of individual rights which – it was hoped – no member government could ever again violate. They drew, in part, on the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed only a few months earlier in Paris. But where the Universal Declaration was essentially aspirational, the European Convention featured an enforcement mechanism – an international Court – which was to adjudicate on alleged violations of its articles and to hold governments to account. Today, this is the European Court of Human Rights, whose rulings are binding on 46 European nations, the most far-reaching system of international justice anywhere in the world.