BRUSSELS — The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner Michael O’Flaherty told POLITICO on Wednesday that the current political climate troubles him like never before.
“I’ve worked in the field of human rights my whole adult life. I’ve never seen a more worrying moment,” O’Flaherty, who is 65 years old and was elected commissioner last year, told POLITICO in an interview in Brussels.
The world is currently struggling with human rights challenges, including the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East where independent reports have found evidence of genocide, as well as issues related to the instrumentalization of migrants.
“In recent years, we have seen a pulling away from the standards, a willingness to say, ‘if I don’t like the standards, it doesn’t apply to me.’ This would have been unthinkable even 20 years ago,” he said.
“Your government might do bad stuff, but it would still make every effort to persuade you that it wasn’t doing the bad stuff. And today it’s as likely that they’ll say, ‘Yes, we’re doing the bad stuff. And that’s because that’s our choice. That’s what we need in this particular moment,’” O’Flaherty said.
The commissioner stressed that those characteristics are no longer unique to extreme regimes, but are “becoming commonplace in the playbook of the center,” which he said was very concerning, though didn’t provide any specific examples.
“It’s in that center we looked in expectation of the defense of the human rights system that we’ve built up … when that begins to falter, then that becomes very, very troubling for me,” he said, but added that it’s essential not to “give up.”
O’Flaherty also hit back JD Vance’s fiery speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which the conservative U.S. vice president accused Europe of retreating from its values, criticized European governments for failing to manage migration, and lambasted what he called EU “commissars” for being more interested in stifling free speech than in providing security for their citizens.
“Unlike what Vice President Vance said, I challenge what he said, about us having somehow abandoned our values. To the contrary. Europe may not get it right. We get a lot wrong, but nevertheless we stay … broadly invested in delivering respect for human dignity as at the core of our efforts,” he said.The Council of Europe is a Strasbourg-based human rights organization bringing together 46 member countries, including the 27 EU nations, but is not a part of the EU institutions.
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