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Russia withdrew from the Council of Europe in March 2022, after 26 years of membership.The Wiki confirms that Russia was a member from 1996 to 2022, and not only withdrew, but was expelled.
"During its membership, Russia was suspended from voting rights on multiple occasions. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on 16 March the Committee of Ministers voted to expel Russia from the council with immediate effect.[2][3]"
"Suspension and exclusion of Russia[edit]Main article: Russia in the Council of Europe3) Considering that Russia is no longer a member, it may explain why the the Secretary General of the Council of Europe does not have much to say when a few hundred civilian are killed or wounded in the second largest city in Europe and her choosing to focus on a traffic accident of a member state.
[...] In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, precipitating a conflict, the Council stripped Russia of its voting rights in the PACE.[90] In response, Russia began to boycott the Assembly in 2016, and beginning from 2017 ceased paying its annual membership dues of 32.6 million euros (US$37.1 million) to the Council[90][91] placing the institution under financial strain.[92]"
Moscow has accused the organization of abandoning its humanitarian mandate and morphing into an instrument of US geopolitical ambitions used to enforce the so-called 'rules-based order'. The situation in Ukraine was a major source of Russian tensions with the body for years before open hostilities began in February 2022.The Wiki to "rules-based order" is the same as "Liberal international order" which has:
"In international relations, the liberal international order (LIO), also known as the rules-based international order (RBIO),[1] or the rules-based order (RBO),[2] describes a set of global, rule-based, structured relationships based on political liberalism, economic liberalism and liberal internationalism since the late 1940s.[3] More specifically, it entails international cooperation through multilateral institutions (like the United Nations, World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund) and is constituted by human equality (freedom, rule of law and human rights), open markets, security cooperation, promotion of liberal democracy, and monetary cooperation.[3][4][5]The order was established in the aftermath of World War II, led in large part by the United States.[3][6]"Below there is some history about the origin of the Council of Europe:
The United Kingdom's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill first publicly suggested the creation of a "Council of Europe" in a BBC radio broadcast on 21 March 1943,[15] while the Second World War was still raging. In his own words,[16] he tried to "peer through the mists of the future to the end of the war", and think about how to rebuild and maintain peace on a shattered continent. Given that Europe had been at the origin of two world wars, the creation of such a body would be, he suggested, "a stupendous business". He returned to the idea during a well-known speech at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946,[17][18] throwing the full weight of his considerable post-war prestige behind it.5) Skipping elegantly how Britain itself contributed to the European conflicts, one finds that the same complex Winston Churchill is mentioned in these articles:
He [Churchill] continued on in his speech to talk about the search for peace and security after years of war, in which he acknowledged the debt owed to Russia for defeating the Nazis in Germany and spoke of the establishment of the United Nations as a means of achieving it. But immediately after that he stated the need for an armed force, created outside of the UN, which would act as the policeman of the world and whose main forces would be provided and controlled by the USA and Britain....
This idea was soon translated into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation created three years later on April 4, 1949 and which, soon after that, revealed its aggressive character and purpose when it attacked North Korea and China in 1950, under the guise of a UN operation.
Churchill justified the need for such a force by declaring that the world faced the treat of "tyranny," by which he meant primarily socialism and its threat to western capital and in particular Soviet socialism.
But he then said something important that both London and Washington now deny, the Russian need for security. He stated,Reading the above one could say that the Council of Europe, in the context of events over the last 10 years, has returned to the vision of Winston Churchill. And, as if by coincidence, the Council of Europe celebrates 75 years on May 5, while NATO celebrates 75 years on April 4.But of course, that left open the threat of NATO aggression and of the Cold War and immediately after that paragraph he modulated his speech to claim the USSR was a threat to the peoples of the west, with this famous line,"We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression,"Of course, this "Iron Curtain,' existed only in Churchill's imagination as the peoples of eastern Europe had been liberated from fascism and allowed to enjoy the benefits of socialism, which was largely denied to the peoples in western Europe and North America. The artificial division expressed in the phase "Iron Curtain, was really a propaganda phrase setting the stage for the economic and military siege imposed on the new socialist republics in Eastern Europe, and on the USSR which became known as the Cold War."From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."
He also stated that, "The safety of the world requires a new unity in Europe."
But he did not include the USSR or Russia in his vision of a united Europe, which meant a unified Europe under Anglo-American domination, and falsely claimed that,thereby projecting onto Russia, the ambitions of the Anglo-American alliance that could only maintain its dominance through war and the threat of war."Though I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war... they desire the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines,"
Observer status was designed for non-European democracies willing to contribute to democratic transitions in Europe.[16]Do we need to say there has been no discussion of the Nord Stream sabotage, see links in Biden's attack on Nord Stream pipelines was aimed at Germany - Seymour Hersh, no major upset about democracy in Israel, or consideration of topics like The End of Democracy: "What I'm Describing is Military Rule"
Canada, Japan, Mexico, the U.S. and the Holy See have observer status with the Council of Europe and can participate in the Committee of Ministers and all intergovernmental committees. They may contribute financially to the activities of the Council of Europe on a voluntary basis.
The parliaments of Canada, Israel and Mexico have observer status with the Parliamentary Assembly and their delegations can participate in Assembly sessions and committee meetings.
On 16 and 17 May of this year, European leaders will gather in Reykjavik for the 4th Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Council of Europe. This will be an opportunity for our 46 member states to recommit to the values and standards that this Organisation protects and promotes across our common legal area. More than that, these leaders will have the chance to agree on specific actions and priorities that will improve the lives of people throughout our continent. This could not be more timely. The brutal, illegal and ongoing aggression launched by the Russian Federation against Ukraine and its people has made a deep impact on the geopolitics of Europe and the wider world. Every international organisation must be clear about how it will adapt its action in order to take account of the new realities and to ensure the success of multilateralism in line with its mandate. The Council of Europe is no exception.Wikis to terms used: multilateralism and democratic backsliding.
■This Organisation was established to ensure peace based on unity, underpinned by human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Democratic security of this kind, however, relies on political will. The Russian Federation lost that will over the course of many years. It began a process of democratic backsliding that can be charted in previous annual reports and, ultimately, led up to the appalling violence that necessitated Russia's swift exclusion from this Organisation last year.
■Reykjavik will therefore be the place in which we ask member states to demonstrate their determination to ensure that the Russian Federation will be both the first and last country to break away from our values and our Organisation, that democratic backsliding will be halted and reversed and that they will work together so that our standards are applied across every aspect of Europeans' lives - both existing challenges and those that emerge.
The council's website and social media do not appear to mention the mass murder in Russia. Secretary General Marija Pejcinovic Buric has not reacted to it on her X (formerly Twitter) account.Marija Pejčinović Burić is Croation, a country that emerged after the NATO led dismantling of Yugoslavia, thanks. Many CoE members and its affiliated observers would argue, the dismantling was thanks to humanitarian intervention, promotion of freedom, democracy, human rights, and the "rules-based order". For more on how that came about, see the links in this article: NATO's illegal 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia 'a huge tragedy' - Putin
Comment: It's not by accident that the White House is, obviously deliberately, looking to inflame Christians by openly mocking their traditions. All the rhetoric around the blasphemous move is designed to incense Christians (including much of that coming from 'the right'). As James Lindsay says, "They do these provocations intentionally... as a means of stoking a reaction they can use to their advantage."
Click through to see Lindsay's entire post below (worth the read):
See also: