Last month, nearly four years after Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe over its invasion of Ukraine, the continent’s oldest intergovernmental organization once again welcomed Russian delegates in an official capacity. They were not, however, the familiar figures that once walked the halls of the Palace of Europe in Strasbourg, the likes of Kremlin television propagandist Pyotr Tolstoy or Russia’s former Washington ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Instead, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, which brings together lawmakers from 46 European states, opened its doors to representatives of Russia’s anti-war and pro-democracy opposition, 15 of whom — myself included — now sit on its newly established Platform for Dialogue.
“Russia is not only a regime,” Petra Bayr, an Austrian lawmaker and President of the Assembly, said opening the Platform’s first meeting. “There are people inside and outside the country who reject the war, who condemn the crimes committed in their names, who want their country not to be an aggressor, but a partner. … Europe has not forgotten you.”
Formed in the late 1940s in the wake of the Second World War, the Council of Europe was intended to bring peace and good-neighborly relations to a ravaged continent. Its founding document, the European Convention on Human Rights, was drawn up in 1950 and remains in force, with additional protocols, to this day. The founders’ vision of a Pan-European human rights body seemed like a distant dream in the time of the Cold War when half of the continent was enslaved by the Communist bloc.
But the dream came true when, after the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the former captive nations rejoined the European family, with Russia itself becoming a full member of the Council of Europe in 1996. “Our rendezvous with history,” Rudolf Bindig, a German lawmaker and the rapporteur on Russia’s accession, remarked at the time.
To this day, European policymakers debate whether that decision was right. Even during its brief period of democracy in the 1990s, Russia fell short of many of the standards accepted in the Council of Europe. And with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000, even those sprinklings of freedom were swept away in an authoritarian restoration. With no national election under Putin assessed by international observers as free and fair, the claim by Russia’s official parliamentarians to represent the country in the Assembly was at best dubious.
But there were strong arguments on the other side too, chief of them being that Russian citizens could now appeal the unlawful decisions of their government to the European Court of Human Rights. In many cases, Strasbourg was the only place Russians could find real justice — over the years, the court has issued thousands of rulings in their favor. At times, justice has been posthumous. Last week, the European court ruled that the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s arrest and imprisonment by Russian authorities in 2021 had been unlawful.
Accession to the Council of Europe also came with conditions — including a permanent moratorium on the death penalty and the transfer of prisons from the security services to civilian control (a move largely reversed by Putin last year). The few rights I enjoyed during my imprisonment — such as the right to correspondence and the right to lawyer visits — came as a result of those conditions. My friends imprisoned in Belarus, which never joined the Council of Europe, did not even have that.
After Putin attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Russia’s continued membership became untenable, and the Assembly voted to expel it. But, as Bayr noted at last month’s meeting, “geography remains.” Russia is Europe’s largest country — and European lawmakers are fully aware that, for as long as it continues to be ruled by an aggressive dictatorship, no peace or security on the continent will be possible.
The new Russian Platform will work on many practical issues, from advocating for Russian political prisoners to strengthening sanctions on Putin’s war machine and its sources of funding. But one other priority will be devising a road map for the post-Putin transition. Political change in Russia has often come unexpectedly — the swift collapse of the Czarist empire in 1917 and the Soviet regime in 1991 are cases in point — and it is important to be ready for that window when it opens and to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 1990s that led us to where we are now. Next time, we have no right to fail.
Political leaders across Europe are increasingly looking to that future. “We must hold on to hope, the hope that one day Russia too will return to the Council of Europe as a democratic country, just as Germany was allowed to return after the self-inflicted catastrophe of the 20th century,” Germany’s justice minister Stefanie Hubig told the Assembly last month.
Today her words seem like a distant dream. But so did the aspirations for a Pan-European human rights body in the time of the Cold War.
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