Otherwise, a large demographic of the population would be missed out on. Young people were also a very diverse group, only combined by age, with not everyone defending democracy either. Active steps were needed in educational training, too. Ms BRYNJÓLFSDÓTTIR asked Mr KOX if there was a real opportunity for more co-operation between the Council of Europe and the UN. Mr KOX said there was no alternative for effective multilateralism than working together on the basis that, if we all behave, we would not end up in a mess. The Summit would bring together 46 Heads of State and Government the following day, he said, but also the EU, OSCE, the UN Human Rights Commissioner; all were in the same boat. Politicians allowed multilateralism to be weakened, and unilateralism was coming up in mild or aggressive ways. The Americans would say failure was not an option. Restore and strengthen rules-based multilateralism. The Summit had to show that the rest of the world would be here finding the answers to the same questions. Mr Aleksander POCIEJ referred to the moral strength of the organisation. Thanks to its convention and standards-setting role as well as its whole machinery, monitoring, he said the Council of Europe was the cornerstone of multilateral order in Europe. His question was about EU accession: it was a unicorn, beautiful, but no one could see it. In Seville, they had spoken to the EU Commissioner for Enlargement, but he did not want to speak about accession. He asked Ms GYLFADÓTTIR about making it happen. He asked Ms BERMANN about the European political community, which was dangerous for the Organisation. Mr Iulian BULAI was not expecting the engagements of democratic principles, which were to be signed by the Heads of State and Government. If member countries were not implementing decisions of the Court, how could they ensure a mechanism could be created where people and Heads of State and Government accepted these principles, too? It was a concern also raised by youth in the morning during the round table. Mr Titus CORLĂŢEAN said the Summit had extra meaning for the Socialist group. The vision was proposed by the former leader of the group and ex-president of the Assembly, Mr Michele Nicoletti, already valid before the war. He mentioned the keywords which had come up: a rules-based society, multilateralism, and after the war of aggression started, accountability, crime of aggression, EU Strategic Partnership, accession, the European Convention of Human Rights, social rights, human rights, new generation of human rights, not to forget enlargement. He asked Ms BRYNJÓLFSDÓTTIR if she was in Bucharest in 2019 during the Romanian EU presidency of the Council, privileging the Council of Europe’s policies for enlargement with their knowledge. Despite the assets, values, and democratic great things done by the Council of Europe, he said they had all seen the war happen in their home, in Europe. He referred to important moments in time, such as: the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was an agreement to outlaw war from international acceptance; in 1933, the London Convention for the Definition of Aggression; the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute after the Second World War. Nevertheless, he said it happened. After the war, he said Russia would not be disappearing from the continent. Taking into account their democratic expertise, and what the Summit would or would not achieve, he asked Ms BERMANN, the government (the Committee of Ministers), and the politicians (the Parliamentary Assembly, which he called the “engine of Europe”) what the Council of Europe should take, across all of their perspectives, as the first two major actions put in place to give hope and democratic security to the whole of Europe. Mr POCIEJ asked again about being keen about EU accession and about the meaning of a new European political community, and what the difference was with their organisation. On EU accession and the European Convention on Human Rights, Ms BRYNJÓLFSDÓTTIR said it was the centrepiece of the Council of Europe when it happened, since negotiations were underway and going in the right direction. Ms BRYNJÓLFSDÓTTIRasked about France’s initiative. Ms BERMANN explained that the initiative of the President of the French Republic revived an old idea of President Mitterrand: that of the European Confederation. According to her, the problem was that there was the European Union from which the United Kingdom left, and that there were immediate candidate and others

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