Five Questions on How the Council of Europe Deals with Putin

The Council of Europe is somewhat less familiar than the EU institutions. What is the Council, exactly, and how did Russia come to be on it in the first place?

The Council of Europe, formed in 1949, predates the EU and is Europe’s guardian of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. It upholds the European Convention on Human Rights, and monitors compliance with several other important conventions. Its most important institution is the European Court of Human Rights and its biggest achievement the abolition of the death penalty. Important for our purposes was that the organization expanded in the aftermath of the Cold War and now has 46 members including Turkey, countries in the Balkans and Caucasus and—until recently–Russia. The Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) brings together legislators from all the member states and is active in drafting resolutions on pressing human rights issues.

The case is of interest to our project on Illiberal Regimes and Global Governance because it allows us to track how European parties and legislators responded to Putin over time. Can you provide an overview of how the PACE dealt with Russia prior to its expulsion after the Ukraine War?

Russia applied for membership immediately after the Cold War. Not to be left out of this “return to Europe”, the Council of Europe was the only regional organization that Russia could enter. But Russia was initially rejected because it did not fulfill the membership criteria with respect to democracy and human rights. The launch of First Chechen war was also seen as a violation of core norms. Shortly thereafter, however, the “accommodation” faction in PACE gained the upper hand and approved Russia’s entry into the organization, despite heated debate and even the resignation in protest of the deputy Secretary-General of the Council.

The relation between PACE and Russia continued to see-saw between sanction and accommodation. In response to the Second Chechen War, PACE issued numerous calls for the Committee of Ministers to launch a suspension procedure. Although this did not occur, PACE suspended voting rights in the Assembly. After these rights were restored, Russia intervened in Georgia in 2008 and a resolution to again withdraw voting rights failed to pass by a thin margin. With the annexation of Crimea in 2014, PACE finally resolved to withdraw the Russian delegation’s voting rights a second time. Russia carried out the threat to withhold its financial contributions in 2017 and actively sought out friendly politicians. PACE restored voting rights again in 2019, but following the invasion of Ukraine it was finally expelled from the Council altogether.

The data you have collected on voting in the PACE speak to the identity of a pro-Russian coalition. They allow us to see how legislators voted based on their country, their party and other characteristics like gender. Which parliamentarians in the Council of Europe represented the accommodationist approach and which pressed for a harder line?

The pro-Russian coalition consists in the first instance of delegations from the former Communist countries who did not switch allegiance after the Cold War: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Serbia. The staunchest anti-Russian states were those concerned over the Kremlin’s imperialist agenda and fearful of  Russian aggression: Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, and Georgia. In these two groups, differences between parties are comparatively smaller.

The West European countries sort in between, mostly depending on their energy trade with Russia. However, it is also in these countries where we see the biggest rifts between parties. Interestingly, both far-left and far-right parties (with the exception of the PiS in Poland and the Sweden Democrats) are most supportive of Russian positions. This could be as a result of an historical legacy of shared Communist ideology (far-left), out of sympathy for Russia’s challenge to the liberal mainstream on issues such as migration and gender+ equality (far-left and far-right), or in defiance of the constraints the Council poses to national sovereignty (more far-right). Most opposed to Russian positions are liberal and new left parties, but again surprisingly social-democratic and center-right parties were divided on Russia.

In addition to national and party identifiers, your paper considers how women in the PACE voted. What did you find?

 There are tricky methodological issues to sort out the the effects of gender, because women tend to sort into more liberal parties. Controlling for this problem, we found that gender played a statistically significant but substantively modest role. The gender effect is concentrated within more culturally liberal parties and is only observed after the Pussy Riot incident, in which the Kremlin sought to marginalize the female protesters by casting them as morally wrong and violating Russian traditional and conservative values. We interpret this as evidence that liberal women perceive Putin’s illiberal turn as more threatening than liberal men, whereas there is no difference based on gender in conservative parties. We also collected new data on support for PACE declarations supporting LGBT rights. We were able to show that MPs more supportive of LGBT rights vote against Russian positions more often and this effect is most pronounced in conservative parties, perhaps because of differences between more culturally liberal and conservative factions.

One last finding on gender is worth underlining. In the delegations from former Communist countries allied with Russia, pro-LGBT women form an important opposition to Russian positions. I think this hints at why autocrats tend to crack down on these groups: they are likely to mobilize in favor of democracy and human rights and against the regime.

There is a broader policy question motivating your paper. Under what circumstances do you think international organizations should engage with non-democratic states—presumably to influence them—and when should they move to shut them out?

International organizations with strong democratic membership criteria face a dilemma. Inviting countries in—or keeping them in–when they have no intention to adhere to the values of the organization risks hurting the credibility and legitimacy of the organization. Escalating conflict can also lead to institutional deadlock. Disengagement, however, comes at the cost of losing multilateral channels of influence. And in the case of international courts, monitoring bodies, or parliamentary organizations, shutting non-democracies out takes away critical resources from political opposition and civil society in these countries. Russian citizens and organizations used to overwhelm the European Court of Human Rights with their numerous petitions. With the expulsion of Russia, PACE’s monitoring reports and fact-finding visits, during which PACE parliamentarians would be meet with civil society and opposition, have also been terminated.

What IOs need are clear legal procedures for such cases: monitoring tools to assess violations, decision-making rules that cannot be blocked by the perpetrator, and a clear escalation logic from suspending certain rights of representation to withholding financial benefits to expulsion. Without this toolbox, IOs have no leverage. However, we also need to acknowledge that there might come a time when sanctions lose their deterrence effect, and Russia appears to be such a case. The regime has such a tight grip on power that widespread mobilization in response to sanctions becomes unlikely. In that case, expulsion becomes the only option. Another important test case on the horizon is Turkey. In response to recent developments, PACE—but not the Committee of Ministers–issued a press statement expressing concern. So far, however, none of the Court’s rulings and PACE resolutions have deterred Erdogan from cracking down on the opposition.

Dr. Jana Lipps is a SNSF Ambizione Fellow at the Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Previously, she held a Senior Researcher position at ETH Zurich.

Thumbnail credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Further Reading

Lisa Anders and Sonja Priebus on the Orban Problem

Christophe Hillion, Tommaso Pavone, and Antoinette Scherz on the EU and Poland

Alexander Baturo on Russia’s Anti-Nazism Campaign

Jana Lipps and Marc S. Jacob on Illiberal Regimes in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe