The European Vector of Russia’s Foreign Policy: On the Anniversary of Russia’s Accession to the Council of Europe

On February 28, 1996, the Russian Federation acceded to the Council of Europe. Russia was pleased with another foreign political success. Full of hopes for amiable and friendly cooperation with other European states. Full of illusions.

A quarter of a century of Russia’s participation in the Council of Europe is a major milestone that is surely worthy of celebration. It begs for long celebratory speeches and triumphal reports. There is, however, no desire to do any of this.

Relations with the Council of Europe are rapidly deteriorating once again. Contradictions are mounting. There is a growing sense of resentment over the fact that all the good that the oldest pan-European organization has done are being consigned to oblivion. Once more, these feelings are being used by the European Union to shamelessly put pressure on Russia and drive the confrontation deeper.

But why is the European Union using the Council in this way? Because there had been a certain division of labour before the European Union subsumed all those substantive functions that the Council of Europe possesses. Because Brussels has always controlled the Council of Europe, although until recently, some appearances had been preserved of its member states acting in their individual capacities. For the past few decades, the Council of Europe has been progressively working for the European Union as an outsourced organization of sorts, either implementing technical aid programmes and projects as part of preparing third states for accession to the integration association, or else handling the objectives formulated as part of the Eastern Partnership.

Accordingly, to understand the current difficulties Russia is facing in the Council of Europe, we need to analyse the developments in EU–Russia relations and the manner in which the Council of Europe and all of its institutional and conventional bodies can be used to do a political put-up job for the integration association. Our conclusions can be used to compare the options for Moscow’s further participation in the Council of Europe’s activities.

As tensions between Russia and the European Union have grown recently, the Council of Europe has lost what made it so valuable and attractive in the first place, namely, the friendly family atmosphere offered by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe for discussing any and all issues and searching for solutions that meet the common interests of the parties. With increasing frequency, and in some cases systematically, the Council of Europe has been used as a venue for setting forth demands and grievances against Moscow and several other states or to support them.

The current exacerbation in relations between Russia and the Council of Europe, orchestrated from outside the Council of Europe, goes back to 2014. PACE accused Russia of “occupation” and “aggression” and stripped the Federal Assembly’s delegation of its voting right and the right to participate in the Assembly’s governing bodies and missions. In response, the Federal Assembly “slammed the door” and put the freeze on its participation in PACE.

Relations between Russia and the Council of Europe are at a crossroads. They can still be brought back to a constructive track, but this would requires a radically new strategy of Russia’s participation in the Council of Europe, an energetic offensive strategy based on involving civil society in developing and implementing that strategy and providing sufficient funding for the purpose.

Important elements of this strategy could include: the rapid adoption of a comprehensive state policy for promoting and protecting human rights and related programmes of advanced modernization of the national legislation; the establishment of a Council of Europe Assistance Association involving as many non-profit organizations and representatives of the expert community and relevant government bodies as possible that could draw up a new Council of Europe agenda and coordinate it with international partners; the vesting of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation with powerful expert potential and the ability to engage in an intensive dialogue with European political parties; and the appointment of a prominent a well-respected Russian politician as a special representative for Council of Europe affairs, giving that person a mandate to achieve the agreements outlined above. Adopting the above-stated and related measures will create the prerequisites needed to resolve the problems of the Council of Europe, PACE and the ECtHR in a constructive manner. Finding a solution to these problems would be a decisive contribution to normalizing, among other things, EU–Russia relations, which is objectively in the interests of the two parties.

On February 28, 1996, the Russian Federation acceded to the Council of Europe. Russia was pleased with another foreign political success. Full of hopes for amiable and friendly cooperation with other European states. Full of illusions.

A quarter of a century of Russia’s participation in the Council of Europe is a major milestone that is surely worthy of celebration. It begs for long celebratory speeches and triumphal reports. There is, however, no desire to do any of this.

Relations with the Council of Europe are rapidly deteriorating once again. Contradictions are mounting. There is a growing sense of resentment over the fact that all the good that the oldest pan-European organization has done are being consigned to oblivion. Once more, these feelings are being used by the European Union to shamelessly put pressure on Russia and drive the confrontation deeper.

But why is the European Union using the Council in this way? Because there had been a certain division of labour before the European Union subsumed all those substantive functions that the Council of Europe possesses. Because Brussels has always controlled the Council of Europe, although until recently, some appearances had been preserved of its member states acting in their individual capacities. For the past few decades, the Council of Europe has been progressively working for the European Union as an outsourced organization of sorts, either implementing technical aid programmes and projects as part of preparing third states for accession to the integration association, or else handling the objectives formulated as part of the Eastern Partnership.

Accordingly, to understand the current difficulties Russia is facing in the Council of Europe, we need to analyse the developments in EU–Russia relations and the manner in which the Council of Europe and all of its institutional and conventional bodies can be used to do a political put-up job for the integration association. Our conclusions can be used to compare the options for Moscow’s further participation in the Council of Europe’s activities.

Russia Had No Other Option but to Choose Europe

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In the 1990s, when Moscow needed to redefine Russia’s place in the world, it never doubted it was making the correct choice. Other countries, both former friends and allies and ex-adversaries, readily agreed that Russia had chosen wisely.

Russia positioned itself, on the one hand, as a global power that had made a tremendous contribution to world culture and the genesis of the contemporary world order (which is confirmed by its status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a legitimate member of the nuclear club) and, on other hand, as an integral part of European civilization—without Russia, European civilization would have been inferior and impossible.

This positioning predetermined Moscow’s foreign political steps. As the successor of the USSR, it automatically gained membership in all those international organizations the USSR had been a member of, as well as participation in all the international treaties to which the USSR had been a party. In addition, Russia acceded to the universal international organizations that the Soviet Union had not been part of, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the financial agencies of the UN system.

Furthermore, Russia signed a comprehensive Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) with the European Union, stepped up cooperation with the EU states within the OSCE, and became a full-fledged member of the Council of Europe. In all aspects regarding the Council of Europe, Russia gained the privileged status of a state that enjoyed special additional powers, which in Council of Europe lingo is called the organization’s principal payer. This status makes it possible to use Russian as one of the Council of Europe’s working languages, increases the country’s representation in the Secretariat, and allows it to have a decisive influence on the decision-making process.

For a number of reasons, Russia was counting on its political, economic and humanitarian ties with the European Union, as well as with those organizations where the European Union dominated, moving along at a rapid pace. The most important of these were: Russia’s belonging to European civilization; the overwhelming majority of the population and manufacturing potential being concentrated in the European part of the country; the geographical proximity of Russia and the European Union; the volume of their economic, financial and technological ties and trade; the greater appeal of the European Union’s legal, humanitarian and socioeconomic model compared to the American or than any other model; the European Union’s political and economic leadership on the continent following the collapse of the USSR; the fact that Central and Eastern European countries were turning to the EU; and the weakness of the former Soviet countries.

Why the European Union’s Policy towards Russia Failed and Why it Was Inevitable

EU–Russia relations were distorted from the very outset, which placed a time bomb under them. The European Union and the United States prevented Russia’s ideas on transforming the OSCE into an umbrella organization spanning NATO and the European Union that could put an end to their territorial expansion and which would channel its activities exclusively into monitoring democratic changes or the lack of such transformations in the former Soviet and Yugoslavian countries from materializing. They accused Moscow of breaching its international commitments during the First Chechen War, severed the majority of promising interaction formats that had emerged, and delayed both the PCA coming into force (it has been fully in effect since 1997, although it was concluded in 1994) and Russia’s admission to the Council of Europe. Later, these developments created the rather convenient stereotype about Russia having profoundly different values from the rest of Europe.

On the parliamentary front, Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe was contingent upon an unprecedentedly long list of requirements. Specific forms of reporting on compliance with these requirements were also put in place. We should also mention here that approximately one third of the Secretariat’s staff signed a petition calling for Russia to be refused membership (although, truth be told, very few of them actually resigned from the organization later on)—a demarche that is rather strange in international practice.

Thus, in spite of the supposed “honeymoon period” in the relations between Russia and the Council of Europe, Brussels had begun to structure them in a very peculiar manner. Taking advantage of Moscow’s natural weakness following a series of crises and the loss of its most loyal allies, the European Union started to dictate conditions to Moscow from day one. Brussels invariably tried to act from a position of strength or as a mentor, wasting no opportunity to lecture to the “negligent student” who was having difficulty grasping the basics of the market economy at a huge social cost. These developments could not but affect Moscow’s “soft power,” something that Russia had lost irrevocably compared to the days of the Soviet Union, and not without the help of the European Union.

The European Union did everything it could to sever Moscow’s once profound and solid ties with the Baltic states and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Brussels subsumed all of the political, economic, cultural, spiritual, historical, educational and humanitarian ties of these countries to the highest extent possible. As early as 1993, these states were officially offered a “European future” (and not the mutual security guarantees that Moscow advocated), that is, the prospect of acceding to the integration association, which meant transferring the European Union’s political, socioeconomic and legal model to their soil while at the same time receiving help to accelerate their economic development and improve their quality of life.

Brussels, therefore, embarked on a practical implementation of the doctrine proposed by Jacques Delors, one of the most successful presidents of the European Commission, who proposed the concept of concentric circles in the common space of the integration association, namely:

1. the core;
2. the periphery;
3. the circle of friendly states whose elites would be tied to the European Union without being able to influence its internal development and foreign policy; and
4. other powers. Russia was part of the fourth category.

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Then came the turn of the common neighbourhood countries that emerged following EU expansion. Prior to that, Brussels had confined itself in its relations with these countries to attempts to prevent the former Soviet states from restoring their previous ties; supporting their initiatives to counteract what it claimed to be Moscow’s “dictate”; and curtailing, as far as it could, centripetal forces within the post-Soviet space. Today, the European Union is attempting to apply the accumulated experience of the political and socioeconomic transformation of Central and Eastern European states to these countries, while ignoring both the specific features and current needs of these countries and paying no mind whatsoever to Moscow’s negative reaction to what is taking place. Ultimately, the European Neighbourhood Policy (replaced in 2008 by the Eastern Partnership policy following the five-day Russo–Georgia war, which was itself revised in 2014 after the events in Ukraine) resulted in growing tensions along the perimeter of the European Union’s borders with Russia’s, the polarization of political forces and the overall destabilization of the region.

Brussels chose the language of sanctions as its routine instrument in communicating with Moscow, while the latter invariably insisted on seemingly obvious things: equality and mutual account for each other’s national interests. Depending on the circumstances, the arbitrary and unilateral restrictions imposed by the European Union ranged from suspending the ratification of the PCA and its individual sections and articles to freezing talks on a new framework agreement and discontinuing political and sectoral dialogues; from a partial boycott of the Winter Olympics and important commemorative events held in Russia to putting Russian officials, politicians and entrepreneurs on proscriptive lists; from imposing arbitrary anti-dumping measures and launching anti-trust investigations to imposing financial and sectoral sanctions that caused billions of dollars in damage to the Russian economy, primarily hurting the welfare of regular Russians.

Somewhat bewilderingly, events that set back EU–Russia relations occur with a discouraging regularity. Every time an EU–Russia summit shows a glimmer of hope that bilateral relations may start to get back on track, or individual member states demonstrate that they are willing to depart from the European Union’s unanimous discriminatory course, something happens to throw everything back. A few examples: the murders of well-known Russian human rights activists or high-profile politicians; poisonings with polonium or “Novichok”; presidential or parliamentary elections being declared unfree, unequal and undemocratic; malfunctions in the work of gas pipelines delivering energy sources to European consumers; the introduction of new EU legislation that is openly detrimental to Russian manufacturers; etc. These sanctions were often followed, under the European Union’s entrenched logic, with more sanctions.

These events have made the history of EU–Russia relations look like a rollercoaster. Instead of developing steadily, they have shunted from crisis to crisis. The events that undermined the very foundations of bilateral relations were linked either with the waves of NATO and EU expansion and their military interventions in Serbia, Iraq, Libya and Syria, or with Russia’s domestic and international actions, which Brussels interpreted as violations of Russia’s commitments and undermining the international order (by which Brussels meant its own continental dominance, and not the UN Charter). Even the most patient and hardy of us get tired of riding rollercoasters. So, what can be expected from the political elite of a great power?

Additionally, Russia and the European Union unwittingly laid another powder keg under their relations. Mutual grievances and differences on a broad range of issues on their respective domestic and international agendas built up with each passing year. Brussels called Russia’s leaders renegades and revanchists, accusing them of putting pressure on the country’s neighbours, trying to revive the USSR, supporting totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, persecuting the opposition and breaking away from the fundamental values of pluralistic democracy, democratic power rotation, the rule of law, and the protection of human rights. Meanwhile, Moscow accused the European Union of unreserved and unjustified expansion, allowing countries and territories that might otherwise have been neutral and non-aligned to join, changing political regimes by force or through provocations from abroad with a view to extending Brussels’ sphere of influence to those states where the regime change was successful, interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, imposing the European Union’s order on those states, etc.

The parties failed to come to some sort of compromise on any of these issues. More to the point, they did not want to. They did, however, explicitly agree to follow radically different approaches in handling these issues. As a result, Russia and the European Union today bear the overwhelming burden of problems that they treat and approach in diametrically opposing ways. For example, the problems that affect the fates of peoples and entire regions: the bombing of Belgrade; the destruction of Libya’s statehood; and the future of Kosovo, Transnistria and South-East Ukraine. There are also issues on which the overall future of international relations hinges: the legality and permissibility of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states; the legality and permissibility of unilateral restrictive measures and supporting anti-government forces and terrorist units; and the legality and permissibility of arbitrarily determining when the territorial integrity of a state should be protected and when people have the right to self-determination? What are the universal human values? How are they to be protected and defended in one’s own territory? Should they be advanced contrary to the will of legal governments, parliaments and heads of state elected by the people? These are problems that Russia and the European Union view differently.

No bilateral relationship can sustain such a burden, especially when one of the parties opts for containment and, consequently, confrontation. And so it happened that the wedge driven into EU–Russia relations (the Khodorkovsky case of 2003, the 2007 Munich speech, the Russo–Georgia War of 2008, Russia’s 2012 electoral campaign, the 2013 Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement, the Ukrainian events of 2014, and the repeated waves of sanctions that Brussels used in the years that followed) eventually grew into a nearly insurmountable abyss between the two halves of the continent.

The Squandered Opportunities of the Council of Europe and the Dormant Potential of Their Rational Use

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For a long time, the Council of Europe has remained an oasis of sorts against this highly unfavourable backdrop. Regardless of the changes to the international agenda, regardless of the tragic events enraging European society, regardless of the exacerbation of contradictions between states, the paradigm in effect was simple and rational to the point of being pure genius: “We are a united family of European peoples, and we need to handle all the problems like a family, for the common good, and in everyone’s interests.”

By common interests, the Council of Europe meant, as per the preamble of the European Social Charter, achieving in-depth cooperation and further rapprochement between the member states based on common values they had agreed to protect and promote, primarily domestically, but also internationally. This paradigm was specified in the concept of “building Greater Europe without dividing lines” developed and approved by the member states as the Council of Europe’s supreme goal and destiny, the principal guiding light in its everyday activities. At the core of these values are: developing unified approaches to resolving the pressing issues faced by the European states; aligning the common areas in their state and legal construction; and implementing programmes and projects required to create a common legal, social and humanitarian space so that that every person, their life and property shall be equally protected in all European states wherever that person lives and works, and wherever they may travels. In this sense, the concept of a “Greater Europe without dividing lines” is similar to the Russian initiative of shaping a common economic space from Lisbon to Vladivostok that Moscow proposed in 2003.

Given the activities of the Council of Europe at the time and what it managed to achieve, Russian experts had grounds to view it as the optimal venue for building a common future for the people of Europe and shaping the continent’s political structure. When entering negotiations in the early 2010s on the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union with its closest neighbours (which would later form the backbone of the integration association), Moscow believed that creating and strengthening such a union would pave the way for similarly structuring the super-region that would follow.

It is somewhat telling that, during the Second Chechen War, despite the political storms raging around it, the Council of Europe never condemned Russia for violating human rights and humanitarian law and refrained from including relevant passages in the many resolutions and declarations it adopted. The Council of Europe placed a higher value on preserving its erstwhile “family atmosphere” and continuing to cooperate in every area than it did on political demarches that benefited no one and undermined cooperation. Curiously, a while later, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe (CMCE) was willing to adopt a resolution condemning Washington for violating humanitarian law in Afghanistan, although this resolution never materialized.

The Secretariat of the Council of Europe was of great help in maintaining the constructive atmosphere in the Council. When Russia’s accession to the organization became a fact, a large number of the Council of Europe’s international civil service, including those who had signed the abovementioned petition, rushed to learn the Russian language. They thought that major changes would be now taking place in the Council of Europe’s activities, and knowledge of Russian would be necessary to adapt to the new conditions and move up the career ladder.

Council of Europe experts and civil servants did much to introduce the Russian public, officials and expert community to the wealth of experience the Council of Europe had accumulated, as well as to its achievements and best practices, including social mobilization and managing the labour market. They tried to help find mutually acceptable compromises and promote such solutions that would objectively meet the interests of all sided. Compared to the many specialists who arrived in Russia under the Council of Europe-financed TASIS programme and the technical assistance instruments that came to replace it, their work was significantly more honest and professional. The Secretariat could always be relied on to design and launch a multi-move game that would benefit Russia and other European states.

Today, it might seem that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has always been dominated by anti-Russian sentiments, and that political pressure has always been put on the Federal Assembly’s delegation. Yet this is not the case. Yes, PACE has from the outset monitored Russia’s compliance with the promises it gave upon accession to the organization and the commitments stemming from its membership. It has also stipulated the creation of a special discussion format on Chechnya; repeatedly adopted resolutions that have inconvenienced Moscow, especially following the events of 2008; and restricted the powers of the delegation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. However, up until 2014, PACE had successfully handled all the internal mini-crises.

From the beginning, the Russian party leaders that made up the Federal Assembly’s delegation transformed PACE sessions into a prominent and visible venue for addressing Russian voters and establishing connections with their colleagues in European political parties. The Russian delegation worked actively in all of PACE’s commissions (and not only those that determine its political agenda) and at its field sessions in various cities and regions of the country, and it enabled the delegation members to establish solid ties with a large number of the Assembly’s members and draw enough of them to their side to ensure the unbiased functioning of PACE.

The leaders of the Russian delegation were repeatedly given the opportunity to speak on behalf of all members of European parliament and on behalf of Europe as a whole. At some point, they controlled one of the Assembly’s party factions and could, using the Council’s rotating presidency mechanism, gain this crucially important leadership position. Unwilling to exacerbate the situation, they preferred to give this position to Turkey. So, up until 2014, the balance of Russia’s participation in the Council of Europe, even in its inter-parliamentary dimension, proved to be positive rather than negative.

It was largely positive from the point of view of Russia’s domestic development. Nearly all of Russia’s ministries and agencies, including the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, etc., established solid and productive ties with the relevant bodies in the Council of Europe. For them, the Council of Europe served as an important venue for communicating with colleagues from other states and promote their interests, a source of expert knowledge and a useful instrument for ensuring that the programmes and projects they needed were implemented both domestically and internationally.

Relying on the Council of Europe’s expert capabilities and institutional potential, Moscow was handling the dual task of modernizing its legal regulations and international expert assessments and legitimizing the newly adopted legislation. Back when the 1993 Constitution was in development, the Venice Commission, or the European Commission for Democracy through Law, gave a favourable opinion of the draft. Later, Russia worked on new versions of the Penal Code, the Civil Code, the Civil Procedural Code, and many other legal acts in close collaboration with the prominent experts selected by the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe also supported some important changes to the functioning of the Russian state machine, such as setting up the Investigative Committee as an independent agency.

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The Council of Europe assisted Moscow in handling some extremely difficult foreign political and foreign economic tasks. For example, a large negotiating team comprising representatives of all the relevant agencies succeeded in having the conditions for striking Russia from the Financial Action Task Force’s blacklist approved by the Council of Europe’s regional body acting in connection with the FATF. Subsequently, when the conditions were met, Moscow used the Council of Europe’s assistance to have Russia struck from the black list. This allowed Moscow to open the Russian economy for unobstructed influx of foreign investment.

Russia’s participation in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) greatly benefited Russian society, its citizens and its legal system. A large number of judgments rendered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) was effectively used by the Executive Office of the President, the Supreme Court and the Ministry of Justice to hone and modernize law enforcement practices, carry out legal and institutional reforms, institute new procedures, and draft proposals on fine-tuning the current legislation.

The case law created by the ECHR became a sort of a bridge between Russia’s domestic law and the domestic law of the EU states. Since the ECHR was directly applicable in the Russian Federation, courts of all levels gained additional capabilities to provide better protection of the legal interests and rights of Russian citizens and of all persons under Russian jurisdiction.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of the benefits that the Russian state and society had received, and still could receive, from effective membership in the Council of Europe. They are too numerous to include here. However, the benefits we have mentioned allow draw the general conclusion that, despite everything, the Council of Europe is capable of bringing great advantages to Russia.

Nevertheless, following the sharp exacerbation of EU–Russia relations over the Khodorkovsky case in 2003, the Munich speech of 2007, the trials and tribulations of the Russo–Georgian of 2008 and the criticism of the 2012 elections in Russia, and the radical deterioration of relations after the 2014 Ukrainian events, the benefits became less visible due to the partial degeneration Council of Europe and its bodies and by the systemic political pressure they tried to put on the Russian leadership and its domestic and foreign policies.

The Council of Europe’s relevance in the European architecture declined significantly. The logic imposed by the deepening integration prompted the European Union to transplant virtually everything valuable they found in the organization’s activities onto its soil. The ECHR was duplicated and replaced with the more ambitious and advanced Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. As a consequence, the Court of Justice of the European Union was afforded the opportunity to actively apply the Charter, which it duly did, thereby successfully forcing the ECtHR into the background. The European Agency for Fundamental Rights started working actively within the European Union, largely duplicating the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, a Council of Europe body with similar functions. All of the Council of Europe’s multilateral conventions on cooperation between law enforcement agencies and judicial bodies, the closer alignment of criminal and criminal and procedural law, etc., were written into in the appropriate regulations and directives, giving substantive content to the EU Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice.

Consequently, the Council of Europe has lost its significance for the European Union, shunted into the periphery of EU interests and simultaneously to the periphery of the entire European architecture. Brussels frequently uses the Council of Europe solely for outsourcing and advancing reforms in third countries.

Since the European Union dominates the Council of Europe, it needs the latter largely for projecting its values, as well as its social, legal and other achievements outward. As a result, the Council of Europe no longer enjoys any kind of leadership in law-making, having ceded it fully and irreversibly to Brussels. New landmark international conventions developed by the Council of Europe can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The Council of Europe’s activities are divided into three parts. The first entails providing technical assistance to member states in assimilating the values of the European Union and the Council of Europe. The second consists in monitoring compliance with their commitments under the Charter and the commitments stipulated in previously adopted multilateral conventions and documents. Only the third part pertains to interpreting new problems and challenges and to law-making. It is only natural that, under such circumstances, the Council of Europe’s agenda is becoming increasingly outdated and archaic. The new subjects, particularly those Moscow is interested in, have a hard time carving a path into the Council of Europe’s agenda.

As tensions between Russia and the European Union have grown recently, the Council of Europe has lost what made it so valuable and attractive in the first place, namely, the friendly family atmosphere offered by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe for discussing any and all issues and searching for solutions that meet the common interests of the parties. With increasing frequency, and in some cases systematically, the Council of Europe has been used as a venue for setting forth demands and grievances against Moscow and several other states or to support them.

However, the possibilities for exerting political pressure in the course of intergovernmental cooperation (when 99 per cent of the time is spent on constructive work, and especially when everyone is accountable for their statements and particularly actions) are extremely limited. The discussions at PACE sessions and commissions are another matter entirely. There, people can vent without worrying about the consequences, neglecting to provide any kind of proof, because anything goes when it comes to achieving the necessary political goals. It is not surprising that PACE has turned into a forum that cranks out resolutions and recommendations, condemning Russia for Crimea, the South-East Ukraine, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, persecuting the opposition, centralizing power, flouting human rights, etc.

The latest trend is involving the ECtHR’s potential in the anti-Russian campaign (see more on this below). In principle, any international tribunal must be impartial, objective and unbiased, and must not go beyond the powers vested in it by the states that established it. Apparently, the ECtHR is no longer guided by those golden rules.

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The current exacerbation in relations between Russia and the Council of Europe, orchestrated from outside the Council of Europe, goes back to 2014. PACE accused Russia of “occupation” and “aggression” and stripped the Federal Assembly’s delegation of its voting right and the right to participate in the Assembly’s governing bodies and missions. In response, the Federal Assembly “slammed the door” and put the freeze on its participation in PACE.

Had EU–Russia relations developed normally, PACE would have, as it had done in the past, invited the delegation to return a short time later and lifted the restrictions. This time, however, the conflict became protracted. Since the Assembly failed to arrive at a reasonable compromise of any sort, the Russian Federation, acting upon a proposal by the State Duma and the Federation Council, first cut the dues it paid to the Organization by one third, and then stopped paying them entirely.

On the one hand, discrimination against members of parliament on the basis of their nationality is unacceptable by definition: members of parliament represent their constituents, which means that stripping them of their voting rights is tantamount to disenfranchising all Russians. On the other hand, such a procedure is not stipulated anywhere in the Council of Europe Charter and is thus a gross violation of that Charter.

Since Russia is one of the Council of Europe’s principal payers, stopping the payments resulted in the organization’s financial meltdown and went far beyond inter-parliamentary confrontation. As tensions spiralled further, the question arose of whether it would be worthwhile for Russia to remain a member of the Council of Europe.

Russia’s withdrawal from the Council of Europe would mean a deeper rift between Russia and the European Union, the refusal to build common spaces and, in the distant future, the end of “Greater Europe without dividing lines.” Additionally, without Russia’s participation, the pan-European organization would lose much of its meaning for the European Union. Brussels had special cooperation and interaction formats, such as the Eastern Partnership, the Berlin process, etc., that connected it with all other Council of Europe states.

Since, in the final analysis, Moscow did not want to lose the Council of Europe and everything connected with the activities of this distinguished organization, and the European Union did not want to lose Russia as a member, interlocutor and partner, the following compromise was found and implemented. In accordance with the demands of the Federal Assembly’s delegation, PACE amended its Rules of Procedure to make it impossible to strip parliamentary delegations of their voting rights and representation. In response, Russia paid the dues in arrears and resumed regular payments to the Council of Europe. Additionally, PACE and the CMCE agreed on a procedure for responding to member states committing gross violations of their commitments under the Charter, and this procedure could now be initiated not only by the CMCE, but also by PACE and the Secretary General.

In fact, the arrangements achieved were to some degree a deception, or self-deception. First, PACE still could at any moment choose to not recognize the powers of the delegation from the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, which it immediately set about doing.

Second, all of PACE’s anti-Russian resolutions remained in effect. Additionally, PACE re-confirmed those resolutions and added the Navalny affair and several other items to the list of Russia’s “sins” and also adopted a series of new resolutions and recommendations connected to the supposedly worsening situation in Russia with regard to human rights and democracy.

Third, the CMCE did nothing to revive the former atmosphere of cooperation and joint search for solutions without any whiffs of coercion.

Fourth, PACE and Brussels, which is now pulling its strings, had at their disposal a new punitive procedure that could be launched irresponsibly at any moment with a view to exercising political pressure.

Fifth, starting in 2021, the ECtHR began to churn out judgments with an overt political agenda. On January 14, it ruled on the admissibility of Ukraine’s intergovernmental claim against Russia over Crimea on the grounds that Russia had effectively been in control of the peninsula even before it was reintegrated into the latter. Thereby the ECtHR juridically (and that is the principal difference between its ruling and the political fictions of the leadership of the European Union, NATO, and their member states) delegitimized the self-determination of the people of Crimea as an act of their independent expression of will. On February 16, the ECtHR demanded that Russia immediately release Alexei Navalny pursuant to Article 39 of its Rules of Procedure, since everyone knows the circumstances of the case and, consequently, Navalny’s remaining in custody would be fraught with fatal consequences for him. In the next few months, the ECtHR can be expected to churn out more rulings of this kind that, in the opinion of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, have “no legal grounds” and merely reflect the judges’ own personal perspective on the situation.

In point of fact, the Russian leadership and the EU and its member states should have agreed on entirely different things:

1. abandoning confrontation and going back to dialogue in all the Council of Europe’s bodies, including PACE;
2. re-formatting the organization and its functioning;
3. revising the Council of Europe’s agenda completely, updating it to reflect the needs of the time;
4. getting the organization to once again consider all the issues that concern European society as a whole, instead of focusing solely on developments outside the European Union.

Relations between Russia and the Council of Europe are at a crossroads. They can still be brought back to a constructive track, but this would requires a radically new strategy of Russia’s participation in the Council of Europe, an energetic offensive strategy based on involving civil society in developing and implementing that strategy and providing sufficient funding for the purpose.

Important elements of this strategy could include: the rapid adoption of a comprehensive state policy for promoting and protecting human rights and related programmes of advanced modernization of the national legislation; the establishment of a Council of Europe Assistance Association involving as many non-profit organizations and representatives of the expert community and relevant government bodies as possible that could draw up a new Council of Europe agenda and coordinate it with international partners; the vesting of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation with powerful expert potential and the ability to engage in an intensive dialogue with European political parties; and the appointment of a prominent a well-respected Russian politician as a special representative for Council of Europe affairs, giving that person a mandate to achieve the agreements outlined above. Adopting the above-stated and related measures will create the prerequisites needed to resolve the problems of the Council of Europe, PACE and the ECtHR in a constructive manner. Finding a solution to these problems would be a decisive contribution to normalizing, among other things, EU–Russia relations, which is objectively in the interests of the two parties.