Russia will remain in the Council of Europe after members of the human rights watchdog reached agreement Friday to resolve a years-long dispute that began after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.
Foreign ministers of the 47-nation organization overwhelmingly voted in favor of restoring Russia’s voting rights, which the Council of Europe suspended after Moscow seized the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014.
France and Germany had pressed to reinstate Russia as a voting member of the Council of Europe, which marks its 70th anniversary this month. “It is not in our interests” to keep Russia out, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said.
The Guardian reports that the Council, best known for the European court of human rights, has become the last resort for ordinary Russians unable to find justice in the notoriously politicised domestic judicial system.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told his counterparts on Friday that his country had “no intention of leaving the Council of Europe” and would not be “going back on any of our commitments, including financial ones”.
Ukraine reacted angrily to the decision, which ends five years of wrangling since Russia was stripped of its voting rights in 2014 over the seizure of Crimea. “This is not diplomacy, this is a surrender,” Ukraine’s envoy to the Council of Europe, Dmytro Kuleba, told the AFP.
