Council of Europe
The Council of Europe (CoE; French: Conseil de l'Europe, CdE) is an international organisation that aims to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe. Founded in 1949, it is Europe's oldest intergovernmental organisation, representing 46 European member states that have a combined population of approximately 745 million as of 2026. The council is an official United Nations observer. It operates with an annual ordinary budget of 656 million euros.
The organisation is distinct from the European Union (EU), although people sometimes confuse the two organisations – partly because the EU has adopted the original European flag, designed for the Council of Europe in 1955, as well as the European anthem. No country has ever joined the EU without first belonging to the Council of Europe. Nevertheless, to see these interstate institutions of post-war Europe as clearly separate is 'profoundly misleading'. They each benefit from a 'strategic interdependence' that owes less to formal intergovernmental agreements than to the complex legal entrepreneurship of a network of transnationally-mobilised legal professionals.
Unlike the EU, the Council of Europe cannot make binding laws; however, the council has produced a number of international treaties, including the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR) of 1953. Provisions from the convention are incorporated in domestic law in many participating countries. The best-known body of the Council of Europe is the European Court of Human Rights, which rules on alleged violations of the ECHR.
The council's two statutory bodies are the Committee of Ministers, which comprises the foreign ministers of each member state, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which is composed of members of the national parliaments of each member state. The Commissioner for Human Rights is an institution within the Council of Europe, mandated to promote awareness of and respect for human rights within the member states. The secretary general presides over the secretariat of the organisation. Other major CoE bodies include the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare (EDQM) and the European Audiovisual Observatory.
The headquarters of the Council of Europe, as well as its Court of Human Rights, are situated in Strasbourg, France. The Council uses English and French as its two official languages. The Committee of Ministers, the PACE, and the Congress of the Council of Europe also use German and Italian for some of their work.
The 1949 Statute of the Council of Europe established the organization, initially among Western European states. Portugal and Spain joined in 1976 and 1977 via the Portuguese and Spanish transitions to democracies. Following the revolutions of 1989 and dissolution of the Soviet Union, all post-Warsaw Pact and post-Yugoslav states countries joined (except the partially recognized Kosovo), as well as all European post-Soviet states except Belarus and Kazakhstan. Russia became the first country expelled from the Council, following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.