The European Council is the meeting of the EU's national leaders, who set overall priorities. The Council of the EU is where national ministers adopt EU laws with the European Parliament. The Council of Europe is not part of the EU at all: it is a separate human-rights organisation with 46 member states.
The three names are close, but the bodies are very different. Two belong to the European Union; the third does not.
The European Council brings together the heads of state or government of the 27 member states, its own President and the President of the European Commission. It usually meets four times a year, in Brussels, and these meetings are often called “EU summits”. It defines the Union’s general political direction and priorities and settles the most difficult political questions, generally by consensus. It does not adopt laws. Its President, elected by its members for two and a half years, renewable once, has been António Costa since 1 December 2024.
The Council of the European Union, often simply called “the Council”, is where ministers from the 27 national governments meet. Which ministers attend depends on the subject: agriculture ministers for farming, finance ministers for economic questions, and so on. Together with the European Parliament, it adopts EU laws and the EU budget, usually by qualified majority. The country holding the Council presidency changes every six months and chairs most meetings.
The Council of Europe is a separate international organisation, founded in 1949 and based in Strasbourg. It works on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Its best-known treaty is the European Convention on Human Rights, applied by the European Court of Human Rights, also in Strasbourg. It has 46 member states, including every EU country but also others such as the United Kingdom, Norway, Türkiye and Ukraine.
Example
Russia was never an EU member, but it was a member of the Council of Europe from 1996. After its invasion of Ukraine, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers decided that Russia ceased to be a member on 16 March 2022, bringing the number of members from 47 to 46. This decision had nothing to do with the European Council or the Council of the EU, which took their own decisions on sanctions.
Debates and limits
The confusion is frequent in the media, partly because the EU and the Council of Europe share symbols: both use the flag with twelve gold stars on a blue background, chosen by the Council of Europe in 1955 and adopted by the European institutions in 1985. A further source of confusion is the existence of two European courts: the Court of Justice of the EU in Luxembourg, which interprets EU law, and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which belongs to the Council of Europe.