"The message is clear: there can only be a meaningful Council of Europe contribution if there is a cessation of hostilities on all sides [in Chechnya] and all questions over the fulfilment of Russian obligations to the Council of Europe are removed. Secondly, the council cannot make a contribution other than with Russia as a member and as a partner playing its full part." David Andrews, former minister for foreign affairs, addressing the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on January 25th.
A clear message? Hardly. The conflict in Chechnya has exposed the Council of Europe to charges of double standards, ambiguity, impotence and redundancy. The high ideals which animate the council are being reduced to ashes with the streets of Grozny. While the Chechen capital burns, the council seems reduced to fiddling with forms of words.
What was clear in January, and is even clearer this weekend, as council members discuss the Chechnya debacle in Dublin Castle, as part of Ireland's programme for its council presidency, is that the Council of Europe is caught in a monstrous double bind, arguably of its own making.
That double bind is evident enough in David Andrews's words: on the one hand, the council cannot be seen to tolerate the human rights abuses by Russian forces which its own delegates have reported from Chechnya. On the other, it cannot afford to lose a member-state as powerful as Russia and retain its credibility as a body guaranteeing human rights, by mutual agreement, across the whole continent.
The Council of Europe, of which Ireland was one of the 10 founding members in 1949, was originally dedicated primarily to promoting the European Convention on Human Rights among the western European democracies. However, the rapidly growing political dimension of the European Union, especially since Maastricht, has tended to overshadow the council.
Many people began to wonder why we needed quasi-duplicate institutions, epitomised by the Parliamentary Assembly building of the Council of Europe, which sits across the road from the European Parliament in Strasbourg. To say the least, it makes for great confusion.
However, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 gave the Council of Europe a new lease of life. It has assumed the role of guardian of human rights from the Urals to the Atlantic. Membership has more than doubled to 41 states in this period. The council has become a sort of grooming centre for regimes which are barely embarked on democratisation and rights-based legal systems, but which are desperately hungry for membership of the only club on the continent, apart from NATO, that really counts - the European Union.
In the rush to admit countries such as Russia, Croatia and the Ukraine to this democratic delousing tent, partly on the old principle that it was better that they should urinate away from us rather than towards us, the council now finds that it has bound its own hands. The only sanction the council has is to embarrass, and ultimately expel, members who abuse human rights.
But if Russia is cast back into outer darkness, are we not abandoning its citizens to even worse abuses, and drawing the line for a new Iron Curtain? It is a real and ugly dilemma, which surfaced repeatedly in last January's debates.
David Andrews had just returned from Russia before his January speech, his last, as it happens, as foreign minister. As chairman of the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe, he had urged his Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, to halt the Russian advance on Grozny. Nothing less was at stake, he told the assembly in Strasbourg, than "maintaining the validity of our basic principles".
Five weeks later, those principles look about as valid as a Chechen passport at a Russian checkpoint. The Russians rolled on into Grozny without a backward glance at Strasbourg, and we all have a pretty good idea what has happened to human rights in that city since then. (That is not to say that Maskadov's "independent" Chechnya was not also guilty of gross abuses, but that is a separate issue. Chechnya was not a member of the Council of Europe).
The council's parliamentarians were quite clear as to just how bad the situation was in Chechnya late last January and well before that, too. The assembly's president, Lord Russell-Johnston, reported: "In the cellars of Grozny, thousands of civilians, women, children and elderly people, remain in conditions much worse than those during the siege of Sarajevo, which shocked and revolted the world community".
Mr Ivanov met the criticism head-on, but from a totally different perspective. "Without constitutional order, no human rights exist, you cannot even talk about it. Who can say that human rights were observed in the Chechen Republic since 1996?
"Russia is defending the borders of Europe against the barbaric onslaught of international terrorism. Unlike the civilised world, these terrorists are united, from Afghanistan through central Asia to the Caucasus. This is a threat to the life and welfare of every European citizen."
It was a robust response, but the Assembly was not swayed - in principle. While recognising the right of Russia to defend its territorial integrity and fight terrorism, the Assembly "condemned as totally unacceptable the current conduct of military operations in Chechnya". In practice, however, the council gave the Russians only the mildest slap on the wrist. If things have not improved by the next session of the Parliamentary Assembly - in April - Russia's entire relationship with the council would be "reviewed".
This weekend, in Dublin and in Lisbon, world leaders are attempting to put more pressure on the Russians to moderate the excesses of their military. Token concessions will be made, because the Russians do not like the embarrassment of being regarded as international human rights pariahs. Some lives will be saved, as some were saved when pressure caused the Russians to drop their notorious declaration that all male Chechens between 10 and 60 would be regarded as terrorists.
As a Macedonian parliamentarian said in Strasbourg, "this council is not much, but it is better than nothing". Nevertheless, its impotence in the face of savagery by one of its members is a depressing indication of how low human rights really come on the international agenda.