My Presidency Memories: Türkiye's Presidency of the Council of Europe: Part 2

By making three issues that would strengthen the common values developed by Europe after World War II the target of our presidency, we would be able to demonstrate Türkiye's soft power in foreign policy. 

The first of these issues was already the idea of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. After the September 11, 2001 attack on the twin towers in New York; intolerance towards immigrants, foreigners and especially Muslims increased in Western Europe, with the effect of several terrorist attacks by people claiming to act in the name of Islam, and xenophobic populist political parties began to find support. I met with Secretary General Jagland and suggested that he initiate the establishment of a Group of Eminent Personalities which would propose solutions to the emerging intolerance and discrimination in European democracies. Jagland said that he supports our proposal and will start working on it. A few days later, the Secretary General called me and suggested former German Foreign Minister Joscka Fischer for the presidency of the Group; and with our support, Fischer became Group President. At the November 10 meeting, Davutoğlu announced that an Eminent Persons Group had been formed under the chairmanship of Fischer and took over the presidency with a speech explaining at length the need to fight against intolerance and discrimination in Europe. Names such as former NATO Secretary General and Spanish Foreign Minister Javier Solana, former EU Commission member Emma Bonino, who served as a minister in Italian Governments, were also included in the Group. 

Within six months, the Group held six meetings in European cities, including Istanbul and Brussels, and held meetings with a wide range of people. At the end of the meeting in Istanbul, Foreign Minister Davutoğlu held a working lunch with the Group and expressed the reasons why we initiated the establishment of the Group and the expectations from the report it would prepare. On April 6, 2011, we received a detailed report written by Edward Mortimer, a senior British journalist who was the group's rapporteur. The report titled "Living Together: Combining Differences and Freedom in Europe in the 21st Century" explained that European societies faced risks such as increasing intolerance, discrimination, xenophobia, Islamic extremism provoked by some clerics; and stated that these risks were caused by migration, insecurity, misinformation created by the media about minorities and the mistakes of governments, and included a series of suggestions and recommendations. Davutoğlu, who came to Strasbourg in mid-April 2011 to address the Parliamentary Assembly as the term president, said very angrily that he did not like the report, that he did not accept the concept of "Islamic extremism," that he would not bring the report to the attention of the public in Türkiye, and that we did not get what was expected from the Group. I tried to explain that there were many issues that we could use in the 77-page report, that a few paragraphs on "Islamic extremism" were only related to the activities of some clerics and were not attributed to the Muslim communities in Europe in general, but the Minister stated that he would not discuss the issue further. Thus, we left our own initiative inconclusive. 

I am lucky to have had the opportunity to get to know Fischer, the Chairman of the Group, during this process. I attended the group's meetings in Strasbourg, Istanbul and Brussels. In the periods between meetings, we frequently contacted Fischer via phone and text. Fischer has been one of the personalities I have known throughout my professional life who has influenced me the most. He was extremely realistic as well as a great visionary. In our contacts, he said that the xenophobia, Islamophobia and discrimination spreading in Europe disturbed him very much, so he was pleased that we focused on this issue during our Presidency and that he gladly accepted the Presidency of the Group and said, "Such an initiative should have come from the EU. But it is not realistic to expect this from the current French and German Governments." 

The report also called for the recommendations to be monitored by the EU and CoE presidencies. Despite my suggestions; both Poland, the term president of the EU, and Ukraine, the term president of the CoE after us, did not show interest in the issue. The French Permanent Representative told me privately that he recommended the report, which he liked very much, to his own authorities to be handled within the EU, but that there was no chance of acceptance under the Sarkozy administration. The developments observed in European societies in the last decade confirm the validity of the report's observations and recommendations day by day. There were many occasions that I wish we could have embraced and persistently followed the report, which included the names of Europe's distinguished personalities, instead of shelving it. 

The second goal of our Presidency was to prepare a legally binding European Convention to combat violence against women and to finalize it in a way that will be opened for signature at the end of our presidency. Violence against women is a universal human right issue. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which covers this problem to some extent, was opened for signature in 1979. Although the number of countries participating was high, CEDAW was not effective in combating the problem due to reservations and insufficient supervision of UN conventions. 

Moreover, violence against women is a serious human rights problem in all European countries. The information compiled by the CoE Secretariat revealed that 57% of women across Europe were sexually harassed, one in twenty women was raped, and only 12% of domestic violence against women was reported to the police. The legal systems and legal standards of the CoE member states differed in this serious European problem. The importance of the problem began to be understood within the CoE. In 2006-8, the Committee of Ministers invited member states to carry out a widespread public campaign for an effective fight on violence against women. The Parliamentary Assembly had called on the Committee of Ministers to make a legally binding European Convention for this struggle. When we took over the presidency, the issue was in this situation within the CoE. 

In this human rights problem, which is also very serious in Türkiye, we have tended to implement this call during our Presidency. We appointed a very authoritative person in this field, Prof. Feride Acar, as our member to the committee of experts responsible for preparing the draft contract. In order to overcome the difficulties encountered in writing studies, we lobbied with Prof. Acar at the working dinners. Mireille Paulus, the head of the secretariat of the Committee of Ministers, also helped us a lot in these efforts. The representative of the EU Commission in Aka also supported at every stage. As a result of these efforts, 47 member states approved the opening of the Convention for signature in Istanbul with applause at the last Permanent Representatives meeting before the Committee of Ministers to be held on May 11, 2011. The permanent representatives of many countries stated that the Convention is the most important codification work of the CoE in recent years in terms of creating standards and fills an important gap in the human rights protection system. The silence of Russia, one of the two CoE countries that have not signed the Istanbul Convention so far, drew attention at that meeting. 

The Istanbul Convention, which is the first and only legally binding document in the world on this issue, defines violence against women as a violation of human rights and discrimination and determines which actions will be considered violence. It sets out three objectives ("prevention," "protection"and "prosecution"), to combat the problem and introduces European standards for these goals. 

Pioneering a legally binding international convention on a universal human right issue such as violence against women reflects Türkiye's soft power potential in foreign policy. The fact that forty-four European countries (except Türkiye) consisting of advanced democracies and the European Union have signed the Convention, which is named after Istanbul, increases the importance and value of the conclusion reached. 

The third objective of our presidency was to eliminate the gaps in the ECHR system, which aims to create a common legal area in Europe in terms of human rights. Since 1954, great progress has been made in the establishment of a European common law area through the case-law of the ECtHR, the supervisory body of the Convention, and the right of individual application to the Court. However, with the increasing integration within the EU, member states transferred some of their powers to the EU institutions, and since the EU was not a party to the ECHR as a legal entity, this delegation of authority created a gap in the European common law area. The EU's becoming a party to the ECHR was necessary to close this gap. Thus, the EU would be subject to the same international human rights review as its 27 member countries and 20 non-member CoE members (including Türkiye). This would also strengthen the harmony and consistency between EU law and the ECHR system. A year before we took over our presidency, at the 2009 Lisbon Summit, the EU had already decided to join the ECHR. After assuming the presidency, I brought the issue to the meeting of the permanent representatives of the EU countries in Strasbourg, which I was attending as an observer, and stated that we envisaged to start the first contact with the Commission in Brussels as the term presidency in order to realize the EU's will to join the ECHR with the Lisbon Convention. The representative of the EU Commission in the CoE informed me shortly afterwards that Brussels was ready for the meeting that would start this process. Secretary General Jagland, our Permanent Representative to the EU, Ambassador Selim Konuralp and Foreign Minister Davutoğlu, together with me, discussed the issue with the relevant EU Commissioner in Brussels. Before the end of our presidency, the EU Commission announced that it had received the mandate to start accession negotiations to the ECHR in the autumn of 2011. 

Although eleven years have passed, the EU's accession to the ECHR has still not taken place. The negotiations, which started in the autumn of 2011, resulted in an agreement in April 2013, but the European Court of Justice, which was asked for its opinion, decided that the agreement created problems in terms of EU law and gave a negative opinion in December 2014. Seven years later, the EU-CoE negotiation process that we started during our presidency is still not complete. 

During our presidency, we also experienced a development that we did not foresee. The first popular movement against authoritarian regimes in Arab countries, which would later be known as the Arab Spring, started in Tunisia in January 2011. Foreign Minister Davutoğlu called me and stated that he wanted the CoE to contact the administration that replaced Ben Ali and thus support Tunisia's transition to democracy and asked me to take initiatives in this direction. We met with Secretary General Jagland and agreed to go to Tunisia together and propose cooperation between the Venice Commission of the CoE and the new Tunisian administration. The Venice Commission was the specialized body of the CoE, which was established in the early 90s to help Eastern European countries prepare constitutions and basic laws in the transition to democracy. Davutoğlu said he would be happy to go to Tunisia with the Secretary General and we went to Tunisia together in mid-March 2011. In contacts with the new administration, Davutoğlu seemed very happy to speak on behalf of the CoE. It was decided that Tunisia would become a member of the Venice Commission. Tunisia soon became a member of the Commission and cooperated closely with the Commission during the transition period. I hope that the cooperation with the CoE and our presidency that realized it have made a modest contribution to Tunisia being the only Arab country that has been able to transition to a democratic regime from the Arab Spring and to keep it alive until today. After the official meetings in Tunisia, he met with the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement of Tunisia, Rashid Ghannouchi, at our Embassy. No one else attended the bilateral meeting, which lasted about two hours. After living in exile in London for 22 years, Ghannouchi returned to Tunisia after the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime, and his party became the largest political party with more than 37% of the votes in the constituent assembly elections held two weeks before our visit. 

Our Presidency ended with the Committee of Ministers meeting we hosted in Istanbul on May 11, 2011. We held the signing ceremony of the Istanbul Convention on the margins of the meeting. Foreign Minister Davutoğlu signed the first signature. For me, it was the end of a very tiring six months. The next day, with the permission of the Minister, who said "you deserve a holiday," I flew, before returning to Strasbourg, to Cyprus for a week's vacation, the island which I will spend my retirement years on.