Meeting in London just four years after the devastation of the Second World War, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom signed the founding treaty of the Council of Europe. The organization, distinct from the later European Union, would go on to draft the European Convention on Human Rights and now includes 46 member states stretching from Iceland to Azerbaijan.
On May 5, 1949, diplomats from ten Western European nations gathered in London to sign the Statute of London, founding the Council of Europe in the wreckage of a continent still clearing rubble from the Second World War. The organization was conceived as a forum for political cooperation and, crucially, for defending democratic values against both the fresh memory of fascism and the emerging threat of Soviet communism.
Winston Churchill had helped popularize the idea in a famous 1946 Zurich speech calling for a 'United States of Europe,' though the Council that emerged was looser and less ambitious than full federation, functioning through cooperation rather than binding supranational law. Its most enduring achievement came the following year, when it opened the European Convention on Human Rights for signature, creating the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, a tribunal that still holds member states accountable for rights abuses.
Often confused with the European Union, the Council of Europe is an entirely separate body with a far larger membership, eventually growing to encompass 46 states including Russia, which was expelled in 2022 following its invasion of Ukraine, a reminder of the organization's original Cold War purpose.
Key people: Winston Churchill