Here’s how Russia’s return to a key European international body is a nightmare for every fighter with autocracy across the continent.
Last week was emotionally challenging if you follow Russia. Watching my friends and colleagues in Moscow, alongside hundreds of protesters in support of Russian political prisoners, being clobbered, hunted down and thrown into police vans was hard to process. Sorting through new messages of disappearing queer people in state-sanctioned violence in Southern Russia was hard to process. Tracking down the victims of new wave of terror against Muslim minority of Crimean Tatars in the Russian-occupied Crimea was difficult to fathom. But what was even harder to understand is why would we want to reward the Russian authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin for such behavior? Because the upcoming vote at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to invite Russia back is exactly that — a big pass for Putin on human rights crimes.
Russia was sanctioned and suspended from PACE in 2014 for invading and annexing parts of Ukraine. The Kremlin has made zero efforts to undo the sanctions since then: aggression and occupation of neighboring Ukraine and Georgia continues, the Russian elections are being rigged (now complemented by Russian meddling with democratic elections around the world) and human rights violations are systemic and brutal. Yet, a new pending vote at the PACE session on June 24-28th will allow Russians to come back. The idea of ‘forgiving’ Russia is championed by the Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland and is backed by France and Germany.
Putin didn’t even have to make any concessions — he simply gets what he wants.
The idea is not to just cancel sanctions against Russia, but to alter the PACE’s sanctioning mechanism altogether. The proposed motion robs the Assembly of ability to restrict the country’s voting rights, the speaking rights at the session floor, the right to participate and vote in the PACE committees. Under these changes, PACE’s monitoring mechanism, one of the Assembly’s key instruments, ceases to work. I doubt that any states will be following the monitoring instructions if their violations of the rules no longer result in penalties.
Why does it even matter since PACE is not a household name for many in Europe or elsewhere?
I gather that’s exactly what French and German officials thought when pushing for the rollback. They take PACE for granted. Coming from countries suffering from a lack of rule of law, we don’t have the same luxury. We critically rely on PACE in the fight for our democracies. Historically, the Assembly has been the driving force behind the Council of Europe, the ‘continent’s UN’ and the ‘motor’ powering the European human rights regime: it exposes human rights violations in any of the member states, observes elections. Moreover, it elects key people fighting human rights crimes in Europe: judges to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR is often regarded as the world’s biggest and most effective international court); the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights; members of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture (still widespread among many of 47 CoE member states).
PACE was a helping hand for emerging post-Soviet democracies, built the human rights defences into our laws and now remains often the only international institution exposing, sanctioning autocratic behaviour in Europe — in times when the EU often can’t get its foreign policy act together in time, or at all.
PACE remains important for rule-breakers, too. However, for different reasons. Modern autocratic states like maintaining a façade of popular support and democracy — being an international pariah hurts domestic legitimacy. It’s bad for business, too. That’s why states with severe human rights violations, like Russia, Azerbaijan or Turkey, still keep largely complying with ECHR verdicts against them — often providing the only available legal redress for their dissidents. So autocrats, like Putin, don’t want to quit or destroy European international institutions — they want to hack it. And what’s the best way to do if not to render the PACE rules meaningless, while still abuse the international legitimacy provided by it?
So forget about punishing Putin — if Russia is allowed back at PACE with no clapback at its crimes, it will have catastrophic consequences for the European human rights regime protecting 830 million people. At a time when the merits of democracy are increasingly being questioned all around Europe, such weakening of the Council’s power to sanction countries that gravely violate its fundamental principles sends a horribly wrong signal and it will only encourage other member countries to engage in similar violations.
Isolating Russia is counterproductive, true. But surrendering your core values in the name of engagement is not how you deal with a bully. If you’re still not convinced on the latter then check the latest from the Russian parliament: it has already assembled a comeback delegation to the PACE that will include MPs from the annexed Crimea — another calculated slap across the face of international law. Before returning Russia to PACE, Putin should receive a clear signal that the language of ultimatums with Europe is inadmissible. At least we can demand the minimum: releasing dozens of Ukrainian political prisoners from Russian jails, the return of 24 Ukrainian sailors captured at the Azov Sea and lifting of the ban on Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar self-governing council in Crimea.
Seeing how many in Europe are at ease ‘selling out’ PACE to Russia, I couldn’t help but wonder: if we start taking for granted European transborder institutions, don’t we also erode our own hard-won liberties? Look at the constantly rising number of ‘help’ alerts coming from democracy defenders across the continent and you definitely can start seeing a future when PACE might be of help for ‘established democracies,’ too. But by that time it’ll be just a useless shadow of the institution, established on the ashes of WWII in the ‘never again’ devotion.
Maksym Eristavi is a Ukrainian journalist and senior research fellow at the Atlantic Council.
