Europe's blue flag with gold stars was designed for a different organisation
The circle of gold stars that flies over Brussels was created in 1955 for the Council of Europe, a separate body based in Strasbourg. The European Union later borrowed both the flag and the anthem. People mix the two up constantly, yet the older council has 46 members and a court whose rulings bind governments.
Winston Churchill floated a Council of Europe on BBC radio on 21 March 1943, with the war still raging, trying to imagine how peace could be kept on a continent that had started two world wars. He called the task stupendous, and after the fighting he threw his prestige behind the idea again when he addressed students in Zurich on 19 September 1946. The French foreign minister Aristide Briand had already proposed a federal union of European nations back in 1929.
A statute signed in 1949 created the council, initially for the West alone. Portugal entered in 1976 and Spain a year later, both fresh from transitions to democracy. After the revolutions of 1989 and the Soviet collapse, nearly every former Warsaw Pact and Yugoslav state followed, and Russia later became the first member ever suspended. The council is Europe's oldest intergovernmental organisation with the widest membership and holds observer status at the United Nations. English and French are its official languages.
Its power works differently from the EU's. The council cannot pass binding laws. Instead it drafts treaties and standards, the best known being the European Convention on Human Rights. That convention created the European Court of Human Rights, also in Strasbourg, whose judgments do bind the country found in breach, which may have to compensate victims or rewrite laws. Many states have written the convention's provisions into their own legal systems.
Two statutory organs run the council: a Committee of Ministers made up of foreign ministers, and a Parliamentary Assembly drawn from national parliaments. A Commissioner for Human Rights promotes awareness, and specialist bodies oversee areas such as medicine quality. The annual ordinary budget is 656 million euros. No state has entered the EU without first joining the council, which is why one assessment calls treating the two as wholly separate profoundly misleading.
Source: Council of Europe
