Speech by Mrs Gudrun MOSLER-TÖRNSTRÖM, Austria (R, SOC), President of the Congress Chamber of Regions

European Congress of Local Governments

 

Krakow, 4 -5 May 2015

Check on delivery

Since 1994, the Congress of the Council of Europe has exercised the tasks of supporting local and regional democracy, developing synergies between cities and regions and ensuring that municipalities and regions play concrete functions in achieving the aim of the Council of Europe which is to guarantee the respect of human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

The Council of Europe has adopted two major documents in the field of local and regional democracy: the European Charter of Local Self-Government, a unique international treaty which has been ratified by all 47 member states, and the Reference Framework of Regional Democracy. These texts represent an important source of inspiration for countries which decide to establish or reform their local and regional self-government structures.

The Congress undertakes regular country-by-country monitoring missions for examining the compliance of member states with the engagements they made by ratifying the European Charter of Local Self-Government. The Congress acts as International Observer in local and regional elections and, in urgent cases, organises fact-finding missions to look into specific matters of concern.

Following the monitoring missions, we adopt recommendations to national governments and we hold exchanges with the government’s officials to follow their implementation.

On 26^th March, during 28the session, the Congress’ adopted the report on Local and regional democracy in Poland and we welcomed Mr Stanisław HUSKOWSKI, State Secretary of the Ministry of Administration of Poland, who addressed the Congress. The report, was globally positive, welcoming the fact that the scope of local self-government is respected and that Polish local government bodies enjoy a wide scope for autonomous policy making. However there were some concerns on local authorities own-resource which do not always match the delegated tasks and on the current economic climate that has strained the equalisation system in certain cases.

Concerning the Regions in particular, and their relations vis-à-vis the nation state our guiding text is the Reference Framework for Regional Democracy, which was adopted by Ministers responsible for Local and Regional Government at their Conference in Utrecht (Netherlands) in November 2009.

The principles contained in this text should, in my view, guide the relations between regions and their national governments and protect the role of the regions in Europe. I refer in particular to the principle of subsidiarity, the principle of social and territorial cohesion and the principle of solidarity among the components of a sovereign state. The key challenges for the regions in the future will be their democratic structure, their organisation, their competences and own resources, their place within the state, their relations with other authorities, and above all their relations with the citizens.

Regionalisation means more than just decentralising government departments: it entails popular election of decentralised bodies, participation of the population in the political life of their own region, close co-operation between local and regional authorities, participation of the regions in the central governments’ decisions and representation of the regions in the European institutions.

A number of new initiatives are currently underway in several Council of Europe member states for strengthening, creating or modifying regional structures. The Congress is following them with great attention. In Ukraine we closely followed the recent developments, and we held a thematic debate on the regional dimension of the decentralisation process in the country. Currently, fact finding missions are to be organised in Albania - where the Albanian Association criticises an alleged attempt of the Albanian Government to impair functions of the regional governments - and in France - for the recent territorial reform whereby the number of regions in France will be reduced from 22 to 13.

No matter how the geographical and institutional architecture of a state is conceived, three objectives should be clear: strengthening democracy; bringing political and administrative structures closer to the citizens; respecting cultural and ethnical diversity and heritage.

The Chamber of Regions of the Congress has set up its priorities for 2015-2016: it will continue to follow political developments at regional level throughout Europe, regionalisation, devolution and regional autonomy requests. The Chamber will analyse the attempts by regions to obtain more power, the possible responses to autonomy or independence demands, the consequences of the economic crisis, the defence of regional and minority languages, the promotion of human rights at regional level and the prevention of corruption in regional administrations.

An important milestone in our work will be the debate that our Chamber will hold in October 2015 on “Regionalisation trends in the Council of Europe member states”, based on a report which is currently being prepared by our French colleague Mrs Mialot-Muller. This will give us an opportunity to have an overview of what is happening throughout Europe in the field of regional democracy, and to make recommendations in this respect.

I thank you for your attention.