Wandering in the member states of the Council of Europe

I love my surname Zwerver. It means wanderer, vagabond or tramp.
What I like even more is living according to it. As a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe I did exactly that.
The Council of Europe is about the rule of law, democracy and human rights. The parliamentary assembly is a forum with some 600 members – 300 representatives and their substitutes – appointed from the national parliaments. As a GroenLinks senator I was for the last five years a member of the assembly.

The assembly meets four times a year in Strasbourg. The committees meet in Paris and also in the member states of the Council of Europe. Since there are 45 countries which are member, one has a lot of travel opportunities.
Travelling is nice but travelling solely for travelling is not the idea. Work needs to be done, which I did. I wrote eight reports and thirteen motions for a recommendation in the years I was a member (see: http://www.anszwerver.nl/raadvaneuropa).
Working in a committee means having the opportunity to work on issues which are close to the heart. For me it meant working on issues related to migration, refugees , gender and sexual and reproductive rights. The best way to work most effectively is to become a rapporteur, write your own report and organise the necessary colloquies.

As rapporteur I visited refugee camps in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Croatia and also Palestine. It is horrible and very emotional to visit refugee camps. In Chechnya people lived in trains without proper sanitation facilities. In Azerbaijan I saw people living in broken tents and underground bunkers, in Palestine the refugees lived in very crowded areas. Women and children are the most vulnerable. Very often the problem of refugees and internal displaced persons (IDP’s) is (mis)used by politicians for internal political reasons that do not always coincide with the interests of the people involved. The challenge is to make this clear in the reports and to convince other parliamentarians. For my report “Policies for the integration of immigrants in the member states of the Council of Europe” I organised a conference in the Senate in The Netherlands and invited a lot of Dutch experts.
The reports are debated in the assembly. The adopted texts provide important pointers for the activities of the Committee of Ministers. The idea is that the members of the assembly communicate its texts to their national parliaments in order to influence the national governments. I have a strong feeling that many parliamentarians, whether intentionally or unintentionally, forget to do this part of the work.

The assembly’s initiatives often result in the conclusions of treaties, known as European conventions. At this moment the Council of Europe is busy working on one of the recommendations of my report “Migration connected with trafficking in women and prostitution” to draft a European convention on trafficking, with special attention for the rights of the victims of traffickers.
The Committee of Ministers and the Parliamentary Assembly sometimes differ in their reactions to a given event, as was the case with the conflict in Chechnya. The Assembly imposed sanctions on Russia by depriving the members of its national delegation of their voting rights. It also asked the Committee of Ministers to initiate the procedure to suspend Russia, if that country failed to show that immediate, demonstrable progress was made. The Committee of Ministers, despite my efforts and GroenLinks’s efforts on national level, never initiated such a procedure.

Working as a parliamentarian for human rights and democracy in a wider Europe does not mean seeing immediate results. It is a long process which needs sincere, hard-working, dedicated parliamentarians who want to push the issue forwards, who have to work, very often, without media attention and who like to wander in the member states of the Council of Europe. I loved doing it.

Ans Zwerver, Secretary International Affairs GroenLinks a.i.