Marija Pejcinovic Buric, the Secretary-General of the 47-nation Council of Europe (CoE), highlighted on Tuesday a “clear and worrying degree of democratic backsliding” in her last annual report on the state of democracy, human rights and the rule of law across the continent,

“In many cases, the problems we are seeing predate the coronavirus pandemic, but there is no doubt that legitimate actions taken by national authorities in response to Covid-19 have compounded the situation. The danger is that our democratic culture will not fully recover,” Pejcinovic Buric said, according to the CoE press release.

She added that the CoE members faced a choice. “They can continue to permit or facilitate this democratic backsliding, or they can work together to reverse this trend, to reinforce and renew European democracy and to create an environment in which human rights and the rule of law flourish. That is the right option for the 830 million people who live in the Council of Europe area.”

Pejcinovic Buric encouraged member states to use existing and future CoE mechanisms to address challenges.

The suggestions from her report encourage national authorities, among other things, to return to fundamental democratic principles and recommit to CoE legal standards, including the implementation of judgments from the European Court of Human Rights and fully embrace the multilateralism embodied by the CoE for more than 70 years.