Abstract
This article, published by the Revue des Droits et Libertés Fondamentaux, is part of a dossier on the crisis of the rule of law in Poland and Hungary published by the RDLF. It develops the idea that the rule of law is a concept that has been the subject of a long construction within the Council of Europe in order to make the different conceptions coincide and harmonise. If the organisation is currently encountering difficulties in ensuring that some of its member states respect the rule of law, it is not only because of the resistance of the governments in question, but also because of a weakness in the very construction of the concept, a weakness that is illustrated by the crises that the concept is experiencing in Poland and Hungary.