Russia on Tuesday quit the Council of Europe, the continent’s leading human rights watchdog, pre-empting an expected expulsion over its attack on neighbour Ukraine.
Russia’s withdrawal from the institution that devised the European Convention on Human Rights and helped eastern European nations to democratise their political systems after the collapse of Communism carries symbolic weight.But the decision, announced hours before a vote on its expulsion in the Council of Europe’s assembly, also has concrete consequences.
Leonid Slutsky, head of the International Affairs Committee of Russia’s lower house of parliament, accused the countries of NATO and the European Union of seeing the Council of Europe as “a means of ideological support for their military-political and economic expansion to the east”. The head of the Ukrainian delegation to the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, Mariia Mezentseva, expressed a similar position during the debate, saying: “there is no place for such a brutal state to be here among us.”The resolution, adopted by unanimity, said that the impact of Russia withdrawing from Europe’s court of human rights will be mitigated by the fact that Moscow, it said, failed to properly act on its judgements.
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