The Arrested Lawyers Initiative and Lawyers Against Transnational Repression welcome the adoption of the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer. We commend the Council’s concern for the rights and safety of lawyers around the world. As the Council rightly stresses in the preamble to the Convention, “lawyers are increasingly being subjected to attacks, threats, harassment and intimidation on account of their professional activities as well as to improper hindrance or interference when performing their legitimate professional activities.” The Convention is a historic document and a crucial milestone in safeguarding legal professionals and ensuring that they can perform their duties without fear of harassment, intimidation or violence.
Lawyers play a fundamental role in upholding the rule of law, defending human rights, and ensuring access to justice. However, in many countries, legal professionals increasingly face threats, physical violence, arbitrary detention, illegal state surveillance, and unlawful disbarment for merely fulfilling their professional duties. The alarming findings described in the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) 2024 Report, which are based on a survey of over 14,500 lawyers across 18 countries, underscore the alarming scale of the crisis:
- 57.65% of lawyers surveyed have reported experiencing threats or aggression in the past two to three years;
- 35.36% have considered leaving the profession due to harassment; and
- threats against lawyers have escalated significantly over the last five years, with some regions seeing a near-total erosion of security for legal professionals.
The systematic repression of lawyers, particularly in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, is a direct attack on democracy and the right to a fair trial. The wrongful prosecution, surveillance and intimidation of lawyers, often under the guise of counterterrorism or national security activities, undermines the very fabric of justice. As recent cases in Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and other countries demonstrate, legal professionals are deliberately targeted to suppress dissent and obstruct human rights advocacy.
We share the concerns of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) regarding the lack of specific provisions in the Convention concerning the unlawful surveillance of lawyers and the use of spyware to target them. Given the increasing use of Pegasus and similar spyware, stronger safeguards must be established to prevent state-led violations of the confidentiality of attorney-client communications. We also seek to draw the Council’s and states-signatories’ attention to the alarming trend in government abuse of INTERPOL’s channels to harass and otherwise persecute legal professionals. INTERPOL’s mechanisms contain many loopholes that allow non-democratic regimes to use the Organization’s resources for political and other unlawful purposes. We urge the Council and states-signatories to convince INTERPOL to carry out all the reforms necessary to eliminate such loopholes and minimize the abuse.
We call upon all Council of Europe Member States and non-member States to sign, ratify, and fully implement the Convention without reservations and adopt and enforce additional protections for lawyers not directly addressed in the Convention. The protection of lawyers is not merely an issue of professional rights; it is a fundamental pillar of democracy, justice and the rule of law. We stand in solidarity with our colleagues around the world who continue to perform their duties despite the dangerous environment. We are hopeful that the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer will serve as a catalyst for global action to end the targeting of legal professionals and ensure that no lawyer is ever prosecuted, harassed or harmed for simply doing her or his job.
