Foreign Affairs Ministers set the Council of Europe’s course for the next four years

The Ministers underlined the Council of Europe’s role and responsibility for ensuring the implementation of its conventions, developing new legally-binding standards in response to new challenges, and providing assistance to member states through its co-operation programmes.

They also recalled the importance of the Council of Europe co-operating with its main international partners and, when it comes to unresolved conflicts, working together towards political solutions in conformity with the norms and principles of international law.

According to the strategy, the Council of Europe’s objectives will include:

• the European Union’s accession to the European Convention on Human Rights, to ensure that the Convention applies in a comprehensive and uniform manner across Europe;
• securing the long-term effectiveness of the European Convention on Human Rights system, in particular by further enhancing the supervision of the execution of judgments from the European Court of Human Rights;
• a review of Council of Europe monitoring mechanisms with a view to enhancing their efficiency;
• pursuing the ongoing consideration of the European Social Charter system;
• vigorously pursuing the participation of civil society in Council of Europe activities.

The Ministers stressed the Council of Europe’s important standard-setting work on protecting human rights in the digital age and acknowledged that digital development and artificial intelligence bring significant benefits to societies and their citizens but also pose many new challenges.

They decided that priority will be given to work on a legal framework for the development, design and application of artificial intelligence based on Council of Europe standards on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. 

In this context, the Ministers also:

• reiterated the importance of the 40th anniversary of the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data (known as Convention 108) and called for speedy accession to its amending Protocol;
• encouraged completion of the draft Second Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention), which aims at enhancing the efficiency of co-operation on cybercrime and electronic evidence, in time for the convention’s 20th anniversary in November 2021;
• took note of the preparation of a new and comprehensive Committee of Ministers recommendation on combating hate speech, both online and offline.

Finally, the Ministers took note of the significant contribution of the Istanbul Convention to preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence over the last 10 years.

Link to the file of the ministerial session and to the decisions adopted on 21 May