15^th Plenary Session of the Congress, 27-29 May 2008

Wednesday 28^th May

Speech of Right Hon Terry Davis, Secretary General of the Council of Europe

I will of course start by congratulating Yavuz Mildon as the new President of the Congress.  Yavuz, I wish you all the best in the conduct of your important responsibilities, and I assure you of my own help and support.

I also want to thank the outgoing President, Halvdan Skard, for his contribution to the valuable work of the Congress and the Council of Europe as a whole during the time of his mandate.  I have always had excellent relations with whoever is President of the Congress, but my relations with both Halvdan Skard and his predecessor, Giovanni di Stasi, have been even better of that were possible.

Finally, I should also like to thank and congratulate the old and the new Secretary General of the Congress - Ulrich Bohner.

This year, the composition of delegations to Congress has also been renewed.  This follows the change in your rules following the adoption of the new Charter in May 2007 by the Committee of Ministers, which now require an equitable representation of women and men with at least 30% of the under-represented sex.  I welcome this progress towards greater gender equality, which is one of our key objectives, but I will add a short comment.  A requirement of at least 30% is clearly an improvement, but  it is not equitable because equitable means 50%, and we should still strive to reach this balance in all spheres of life, including politics.

Chairman,

My annual speech to the Plenary Session of the Congress is also an opportunity to look at the state of the Council of Europe and outline our future priorities and challenges.  I do not see this as a lecture but rather a dialogue,  and I am delighted to engage in this dialogue with you because the Congress is making a vital contribution to nearly all major Council of Europe priorities.

One of these priorities, to which I attach particularly high importance, is to raise the level of our work on the promotion of democracy to the level of our work on human rights.

How do we do that given our current budgetary situation. We should not and we will not reduce the level of our work on human rights to finance new activities on democracy. The way forward is through setting priorities, and this is the first message I want to leave with you today.

Setting priorities should not be understood as sorting our activities into what is important and what is not important. I accept that every activity of the Congress, and every other part of the Council of Europe for that matter, is valuable and gives results.  But we must face the fact that while all our activities are important, they are not all equally important.  We only have the resources we have, and we must invest them where they will produce the best and the most needed results.

The Congress is already providing a highly valuable contribution to the Council of Europe work on democracy, and my expectation is that this contribution will become even more important in the future.  This is why it is essential that your work is focused, efficient and effective.

I have great expectations from the new initiative to organise Local Democracy Week every October.  I believe that this project has the potential to promote the awareness of our citizens about the importance of the democratic process at the local level and to encourage their participation in this process and their dialogue with local authorities.

I should also like to encourage you to continue your important work through activities such as the Local Democracy Agencies and the Euro-Regions – specifically the Adriatic Euro-Region which is already up and running and the Black Sea Euro-Region for which the statute is expected to be signed in September this year.  Your contribution to the Forum for the Future of Democracy is also highly appreciated, and since one of your representatives, Alan Lloyd, has now left Congress, although not Local Government, I am happy to say, I should particularly thank him for his contribution to the Forum.

One important aspect of prioritisation is the geographical focus.  I welcome the fact that the Congress has given a geographical priority to South-East Europe, South Caucasus, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus.  This choice fully corresponds to the geographical priorities of the Council of Europe as whole.  It also ensures that the people living in these regions can benefit from the standards of local democracy which most other Europeans now take for granted. 

Of course this does not mean that our efforts should be restricted to only a part of Europe.  There are challenges and there are problems across Europe and at all levels, including the local level.  There is no need to remind you of this fact, and some of your recent very visible activities, such as the monitoring fact-finding missions in several European countries outside your priority geographical zone, have proved their worth.  Please continue with them.

In my speech to the Parliamentary Assembly in January I outlined the main pillars of our new Medium Term Strategy which is designed to implement the Declaration and Action Plan of the Warsaw Summit.  These main pillars are the consolidation of the European legal space, the rationalisation and reinforcement of our monitoring mechanisms, the reinforcement of our assistance programmes and strengthening our campaigning and awareness-raising work.

A brief examination of these pillars of the Council of Europe work shows that the Congress is making a very important contribution to each and every one of them.

I would put it even more strongly. We cannot achieve the desired results of any of these Council of Europe activities without the local and regional dimension provided by the Congress.

And when we talk about the arsenal of the Council of Europe legal instruments, we cannot ignore the importance of the European Charter of Local Self-Government.

As for monitoring, your work in both election observation and monitoring of compliance of national legislation with the Charter has become a key reference in Europe.

The same can be said about the assistance provided by the Congress in the area of your expertise and about your contribution to Council of Europe Campaigns.  Your contribution to the Campaign against violence against women, including domestic violence, and to the “Dosta” Campaign against discrimination against Roma have been very important and have made a difference.

The Congress is also closely involved in our key priority in the promotion of intercultural and interreligious dialogue.  Here too your role is absolutely essential.  If intercultural and interreligious dialogue does not work at local level, it does not work at all!

I wish you a very successful session.