The Council of Europe is an international organisation based in Strasbourg, France, and made up of 47 member countries. Founded in 1949, the Council of Europe seeks to develop common and democratic principles based on the European Convention on Human Rights and other reference texts on the protection of individuals.
The Council of Europe is made up of several bodies, including the Parliamentary Assembly, the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights.
While always approaching the subject from the perspective of protecting and expanding human rights, the Council of Europe has contributed in a number of ways to discussions of Internet governance. Some examples include:
The Council of Europe has also been an active contributor to the Internet Governance Forum:
The Council of Europe provides the secretariat of the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG), working in cooperation with European Union institutions and other organisations.
EuroDIG is a platform for discussing and shaping a European perspective to Internet governance. It has taken place annually since 2008, and hosts discussions on issues of regional significance, as well as feeding into the global discussions that take place at the Internet Governance Forum.
In April 2011, the Council of Europe held a conference to discuss a set of ten draft principles on Internet governance, proposed by a Council of Europe group of experts, and how these principles might be formalised in a soft law framework.
Internet Freedom Conference - From Principles to Global Treaty Law?
The conference discussions were based on the work done by the Ad hoc Advisory Group on Cross-border Internet (MC-S-CI), to which the RIPE NCC has actively contributed.
On 6 February, 2020, the RIPE NCC joined a partnership with the Council of Europe to develop recommendations for its member states on the development, use and regulation of digital technologies. The Council of Europe’s mission is to promote human rights, democracy and the rule of law online.
EuroDIG, the European Dialogue on Internet Governance, held its seventh annual meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria on 4-5 June 2015, attracting around 500 participants for two days of wide-ranging Internet governance discussions.