Ankara says it's too early to declare the priorities of Turkey's chairmanship; however, the Turkish capital wants to use these six months for productive two-way work that will eventually make contributions to both Turkey and the Council of Europe.
It's no secret that Turkey's file in the Council of Europe's various bodies, such as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), is full of a considerable number of significant controversial issues. The 46-nation Council of Europe is currently engaged in a “post-monitoring dialogue” with Turkey. When closing the full monitoring procedure for Turkey in April 2004, PACE listed 12 outstanding issues on which it urged progress. These include lowering Turkey's 10 percent electoral threshold, local and regional government reform, expanded freedom of expression and association (especially for political parties), training of security forces and judges, a policy of “zero tolerance” on torture and the protection of minorities.
In April, when discussing a report as part of the Council of Europe's “post-monitoring dialogue” with Turkey, the Monitoring Committee also asked the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe's body of independent legal experts, to examine the compatibility of the lack of recognition of religious communities in Turkey with European standards, as well as the question of the right of the İstanbul-based Greek Orthodox patriarch to call himself “ecumenical.”
Ankara admits the presence of serious problems yet stresses that none of these problems are an obstacle before conducting a productive chairmanship. “Nobody is immune to such problems. When Russia took over the chairmanship in 2006, it displayed quite a good performance although it had similar problems,” a source involved in the issue told Today's Zaman.
At the time, Council of Europe Secretary-General Terry Davis was quite clear in speaking against those critics objecting to Russia's chairmanship, responding to them with remarks based on basic principles.“Most of the controversy surrounding the Russian chairmanship is based on the misplaced notion that the Council of Europe is a place where West European countries should give lectures about human rights and democracy to their neighbors to the east. Well, this is not the way we do things, first, because the so-called ‘old' democracies are not exactly immune to charges of human rights violations themselves, and second, because one-way lecturing, as any diplomat or teacher knows, does not usually get you very far. It is clear that there are problems, including human rights problems, which persist in the Russian Federation. But it is equally true that for many, Russia is a very convenient ‘usual suspect' for human rights violations. In the Council of Europe we address human rights violations because of what they are, not because of where they take place,” Davis said at the time.
Although Ankara is avoiding disclosing its priorities ahead of its upcoming chairmanship, it stressed that it is eager to leave a remarkable trace in the history of the organization, of which it is a founding member, and recalled Turkey's successful chairmanship in the early 1990s.
