28th Session of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe

Communication by Jean-Claude Frécon, President of the Congress, at the opening of the 28th session

Check on delivery

24 March 2015

Dear colleagues,

Last October, one week after being elected President of our Congress, I held an exchange of views with the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe.  This yearly exchange forms part of the political dialogue that we have intensified in recent years with the representatives of our member States in Strasbourg.

I presented the October session’s activities to them, in particular our debate on separatist tensions in Ukraine and in other countries in that region, our exchange with the Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland on the priorities of his new term, the adoption of partner for local democracy status, which will enable us to step up cooperation with neighbouring countries, and also the post-monitoring dialogue launched with the Ukrainian authorities with a view to assisting them with reforms.

During our exchange, many of the deputies welcomed our initiative to invite youth delegates to participate in our work and strongly encouraged us to pursue this experiment. This is what we are going to do, engaging in discussion with a group of young delegates invited to this session on how to fully involve young people in our activities.

This dialogue with the Committee of Ministers also involved a meeting of our Bureau with the Chair of the Rapporteur Group on Democracy (the GR-DEM), Ms Astrid Helle, Permanent Representative of Norway, on 2 February here in Strasbourg.  Here too, our exchange was most constructive.  Our rapporteur on dialogue with the intergovernmental sector Karl Heintz Lambertz told the Chair of the GR-DEM that the central aim of the Congress is to gear its action to the priorities of the Council of Europe and cooperate as effectively as possible with all the Organisation's other bodies.  We agreed with the Chair of the GR-DEM to maintain this pattern of regular dialogue.

This political dialogue in Strasbourg is a natural extension of the dialogue we engage in with the member state governments in connection with the monitoring of the European Charter of Local Self-Government and post-monitoring. It enables us to make our activities more relevant as we pursue the core objective of practical implementation of our recommendations to governments.

The Congress and its Secretariat now make a full contribution to the preparation and implementation of Council of Europe action plans in the member States, notably in Albania, Armenia and Ukraine. The activities carried out hinge both on our recommendations and the experience of our members (using peer-to-peer review).  This is a unique approach that is generating increasing demand for Congress activities.

With regard to Ukraine, since October we have achieved very tangible progress in our support for reforms. We have continued the post-monitoring dialogue launched with the authorities in May.  In December and then again in March, three post-monitoring units were held in Kyiv between the Congress delegation led by our rapporteur Marc Cools and the representatives of that country's government and local authorities.  These workshops focused on constitutional reform and specific aspects of the recommendation we adopted in October 2013.  A final roadmap for implementing the recommendations made by the Congress will be officially handed over to the government in spring 2015. I will be involved as far as possible in the handing over of that roadmap and I will invite the Presidents of the two Chambers to participate since, as you know, I set great store by collective work.

Where our cooperation programme is concerned, we have organised training sessions on the ground in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine: two regional workshops for young people involved in political life or civil society, a workshop for newly elected mayors and a study visit to Strasbourg for young local leaders from Ukraine, who had the opportunity to dialogue with local politicians in Alsace and Germany.

That group of young leaders, whom I had the pleasure of welcoming personally to Strasbourg at the beginning of November, also took part in the World Forum for Democracy, in which we also played a very active role.

Earlier on, when opening our session, I mentioned the problems of radicalisation and terrorism which we will be debating this week.  Following the terrorist attacks in Paris on 7, 8 and 9 January 2015, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe proposed reinforcing Council of Europe activities aimed at combating radicalisation leading to terrorism and asked the Council's different organs and departments to put forward concrete proposals for activities in order to devise a global action plan for the Organisation.  As you know, our Congress has been working on these issues for a long time.  Accordingly, we have prepared a strategy taking stock of the work already carried out and proposing new activities organised around three pillars to be implemented in the short, medium and long term, with national governments, regions and cities.  Since then, we have seen similar attacks perpetrated in Copenhagen on 14 and 15 February and in Tunis last week.  Our democracies must act urgently to combat this menace.

Now that all 47 member States have ratified the European Charter of Local Self-Government, one of our 2015 priorities will be to have more and more articles of the Charter declared applicable by governments, in order to build a common European area of local democracy. In recent years, a number of our member States have already undertaken to apply certain articles of the Charter for which they had previously expressed reservations when signing up. The Congress will continue to seek further progress in this area.

Dear colleagues, I would like to end my communication with a look at the budget. The Council of Europe's budgetary situation has not been very favourable for us in recent years and we have had to make substantial cuts, in both our ordinary budget and our secretariat.  Of course, the Congress now benefits – and this is a new development - from significant voluntary contributions enabling it to run cooperation programmes in the member States.

This operational dimension of the Congress is a new and important one but it stems from and is judged by the outcomes of our statutory missions. To fulfil those missions, we need a secretariat that is up to the task.  Without adequate resources, particularly in terms of staff, our statutory work is jeopardised and, consequently, the activities based on it will be less effective.

That is the message I conveyed to the Ministers' Deputies at our October meeting.  I trust that you will also convey this message to your Ambassadors in Strasbourg, so that the Congress is appreciated to its full value and backed accordingly.