29/09/2025 Session | European Convention on Human Rights
Standing before the original text of the European Convention on Human Rights, displayed in the Hemicycle to mark its 75th anniversary, the PACE President opened the 2025 autumn session stating that this text “is not simply a document on display. It is the very compass that has guided Europe for seventy-five years toward law, democracy, and dignity.”
The Convention, he stressed, “draws the human boundaries that must never be crossed: the inviolable line against torture and slavery, the line that guards liberty and security, the sacred space of thought, conscience and religion, the open horizon of expression and of peaceful assembly and association."
"These are the protective borders of human dignity — the lines we draw not to divide people, but to defend the person”. Those who drafted the Convention, Mr Rousopoulos said, “set limits so that freedom might flourish within them […], marked the borders of what must not be done to a human being.”
Today, he concluded, the original Convention “stands within this hall because our politics must be measured against it. […] The Convention teaches that the true borders of Europe are ethical: the limits we set to protect the person.”