Resolution 2515 (2023)1Provisional version

The role of the Council of Europe in preventing conflicts, restoring credibility of international institutions and promoting global peace

Parliamentary Assembly

1. The price of every war will always be many times higher than that of its prevention. Throughout its74 years of history, the Council of Europe has played a key role in preventing conflicts on the Europeancontinent, employing a panoply of tools, such as early warning and monitoring, confidence-building, and thepromotion of common values. Recently, however, peace has been fundamentally challenged.

2. After a gradual decline, the number of armed conflicts in the world began to rise again in 2010. Some35 are currently ongoing. Contributing factors to this rise include the breakdown in the rule of law, weak Stateinstitutions, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources that exacerbates climate change, erosion of socialwelfare, the weakening of multilateralism and the passivity of the international community towards emergingthreats – all of which might contribute to the rise of authoritarian regimes. The international order has been putunder an existential threat as a result of the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine launched on20 February 2014 and drastically escalated on 24 February 2022.

3. The Statute of the Council of Europe (ETS No. 1) begins with a preambular paragraph declaring that“the pursuit of peace based upon justice and international co-operation is vital for the preservation of humansociety and civilisation”. According to Article 1 of the Statute, “the aim of the Council of Europe is to achieve agreater unity between its Members for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principleswhich are their common heritage and facilitating their economic and social progress”. However greater unitycan not be achieved without peace.

4. Indeed, the Council of Europe is a peace project, aimed at tackling, in a structural and systematic way,the root causes of tensions and disputes before they erupt into conflicts.

5. The Parliamentary Assembly recalls that security is a wider concept than defence and rests to a greatextent on compliance with democratic processes, human rights and the rule of law. While national defence isexplicitly excluded from its scope of responsibility, the Council of Europe is a frontrunner in protectingdemocratic security. This notion, first endorsed by the Heads of State and Government of the Council ofEurope at the 1993 Vienna Summit, as well as the concept of “indivisible security”, included in the Charter forEuropean Security of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) (Istanbul, 1999), aretoday as relevant as ever.

6. In this new security context fraught with risks, Council of Europe member States should renew theircommitment to the values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. They should reiterate their supportfor the Council of Europe as the cornerstone European organisation to develop a shared space where thesevalues can thrive, in the pursuit of peace based upon justice and international co-operation.

1. Assembly debate on 12 October 2023 (23rd sitting) (see Doc. 15821, report of the Committee on Political Affairs andDemocracy, rapporteur: Ms Lesia Vasylenko; and Doc. 15824, opinion of the Committee on the Honouring of Obligationsand Commitments by Member States of the Council of Europe (Monitoring Committee), rapporteur: Mr Claude Kern). Textadopted by the Assembly on 12 October 2023 (23rd sitting).

See also Recommendation 2259 (2023).

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