Council of Europe: House of Lords Members’ Contribution

If Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe, or chose to leave, it would mean that all Russian citizens would lose their right of access to the European Court of Human Rights. That was probably why, having weighed everything up, including the importance of the Council of Europe, there was an agreement in Helsinki to let Russia back into the parliamentary assembly. The British Government did not oppose that agreement; it is important to remember that. But almost as soon as it had been agreed, the Government started lobbying against the very agreement they had let through. At the last session we had the sight, which I found very unsatisfying, of the UK delegation leading the attempt to get Russia’s suspension continued. A group of members, led by Ukraine and the UK, with, as I put it, sundry disaffected members from former communist bloc countries, put down a large number of unhelpful amendments, all of which were defeated by margins of either 2:1 or 3:1, but rather than seeing sense and saying, after the first half a dozen or even 10, “Let’s accept that we’ll lose all of these”, we kept the Council of Europe sitting until after 1 am voting hopelessly on amendments. Virtually every member of every other western European delegation, including the Germans, the French, the Spanish and the Italians, were voting against the United Kingdom. We were in extraordinarily odd company.

I understand that we have now been invited to a meeting in Riga on Friday 6 September, described in the invitation letter as,

“the first like-minded meeting on further actions concerning the return of the Russian delegation to the PACE”.

In other words, this is a meeting designed to make life as difficult as possible. Rather than stretching out an olive branch, it is stretching out a rather harsh whip. We will be represented there by three MPs—two Conservative and one Labour. All I can say for the two Conservatives is that they were the leaders of all the resolutions that were defeated 2:1 in Strasbourg.

I put it to the Minister that it is not acceptable for him to say that it is up to parliamentarians to decide what to do. I am delighted to see the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, in his place, because I recall that when he and I tentatively proposed that it might be appropriate to visit the Russian Duma a few months ago, the Foreign Office came down on us like a ton of bricks. Do not start saying that there is any freedom for Members and that the Foreign Office is not interested.

How does the Minister propose to put our relations with Russia on a better footing? Frankly, we are all on the same continent. I am not sure I would go as far as Gorbachev and say that we all live in the common European home, but we certainly are in a situation where Britain needs friends. When we leave the European Union we will be in an absolutely ideal situation for people to have a pop at us and decide, “Well, Britain won’t really have the solidarity of Brussels. We can cause them a bit of trouble with a bit of cyberwarfare or the like”. I put it to the Minister that it is in our interests to get together with our western European colleagues and try to get a modus vivendi with the Russians. This is a huge challenge facing PACE today.

Those are my two main points. I congratulate the Minister on still being part of the Government at 6.15 pm; I hope he will still be there at 10 pm. In the meantime, I look forward to him explaining how we will relate to Russia and how we will get a better accord with people for whom we can change history, but cannot change their geography. They are there and they will stay.

The other major problem is Russia. I disagree with the noble Lord on this—against the opposition of the UK delegation, but I am not so sure about the UK Government. We voted in June to readmit Russia, giving the benefit of many doubts, despite 17 record in Georgia, Crimea, Syria, of interfering in democratic elections and, of course, the poisoning in Salisbury. I suspect that it was Russia’s financial contribution which played a substantial part, but it does harm the credibility of the Council of Europe as a forum for human rights.

My final question for us all is: how do we in the UK maximise our role in Europe, post-Brexit? Clearly, we must seek to use all institutions which bring us closer to Europe. This means NATO, and it also means bilateral relations and relations with cultural institutions such as the Council of Europe. We were there at the start and have played a major role. Surely, now we must examine how we can make our contribution to the Council of Europe more positive. For example, we can make a voluntary contribution to the work, because of the budgetary problems. We can drop, with the Italian ultra-right, the objection mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. I hope that the Government are already examining how best we can take the Council of Europe more seriously and enhance the UK’s role in Europe more generally.

The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, pointed out that some parties are not represented in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The first party in the European Parliament to come together with its fellow parliamentarians was the Liberal family. At present there are no Liberal Democrats in the assembly because the appointments are made on the basis not of the election results per se or the composition of Parliament, but of the composition of the House of Commons. I wonder whether the Minister might consider this. After the next general election, which we are led to believe might be quite soon, the composition could be designed not on the basis of the number of MPs a party has but on its percentage vote in the most recent general election. That would perhaps be a little more representative. There may not be a Liberal Democrat representative in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe at present, but, we will be back.

There is probably a corollary: that the Council of Europe’s consensual priorities of democracy, human rights and the rule of law will in any case tend to guide in a certain direction the energies and attitude of mind of its parliamentarians towards their work. Such priorities, transcending party politics as they do, instead inspire a collegiate and constructive approach. To a large extent, this applies at three levels: between Council of Europe parliamentarians internationally; within the Commons’ and Lords’ UK delegation itself; then cross-party between Members here, not least since working together cross-party and effectively is one of the proven qualities of your Lordships’ House in the first place.

Finally, in view of Brexit, the United Kingdom should be very grateful that our membership of the Council of Europe will nevertheless continue. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, has already observed, in that connection does my noble friend the Minister agree that we must become much more proactive in understanding what the Council of Europe has to offer, then in identifying new opportunities and carrying them out?

Violence against children, as we know, continues to be a scourge across the world. Continued vigilance is necessary to protect children from this appalling threat. It is destructive and dehumanising. The Council of Europe has led campaigns and produced reports and decrees. Nations in Europe and in the UK have done the same, and we have contributed to those Council of Europe declarations and reports. The participation of children in our democratic societies and institutions is becoming standard practice in many strategies; for example, in our own NHS long-term plan, and in the panels of voluntary organisations and local authority panels. Many schools have school councils. I want to expand this participation in the Council of Europe, which already has an active youth division. This is why I want the participation of children to be common in the Parliamentary Assembly.

We work hard on the Council of Europe; it is not a holiday. We sometimes work from 8 am until 11 pm or later. I think that we are respected for our dedication and our contribution to discussion and decisions. I hope that this is recognised by the Minister and his colleagues. The Council of Europe is not well-known enough, either in your Lordships’ House or in another place. Can the Minister explain the mechanisms by which the Government keep in touch with the activity of the Council of Europe? I ask this for clarification not for those Members here today but for the information of this House and, perhaps, as a precursor to another debate.

In all these missions, we published our findings on whether elections were free and fair using international standards. In nearly all cases they were not, Turkey being a perfect example of a stolen election. The irregularities on the day were minor, but the dirty work had been done in the two to three years beforehand: locking up without trial one’s main opponent, owning or controlling 90% of the media, abusing all state resources for the political campaign, and banning any candidate, except Erdoğan, from appearing in a photograph with the Turkish flag. Other countries monitored also had rich oligarchs using their wealth and power to sway the results.

Such election monitoring missions are a crucial part of the work of the Council of Europe. The missions help to ensure that the universal values upheld by the Council of Europe are more widely known and that European states are committed to democracy, the rule of law and human rights. I understand that, since 1989, the assembly has observed more than 140 parliamentary and presidential elections in Europe and sent more than 1,800 parliamentarians to monitor them.

Let me thank the brilliant team in Strasbourg who organise the election monitoring missions: Daniele Gastl, Anne Godfrey, Franck Daeschler, Chemavon Chahbazian, Bogdan Torcatoriu and Sonia Sirtori—and there may be others. Not only do they draft reports for us but they organise all the teams to visit polling stations, and I am particularly grateful that they go out of their way to find accessible polling stations for me to get to in my little wheelchair. There is one other person whom I should mention. A brilliant number-cruncher from Sweden, Anders Eriksson, stays up all night of an election and number-crunches the hundreds of reports that we send in during the day. By 8 am next morning, he has a detailed analysis of every single thing which went right and wrong. That is what makes our reports so authoritative.

Finally, let me thank Nick Wright, the long-suffering secretary of the UK delegation, and his team for their fantastic work in getting all 28 of us—not just Peers—to more than 100 meetings all over Europe, with all of us travelling at different times in different ways. That is another great British success story. I laud the work they do in helping us make the Council of Europe so successful.

The first respect in which the Council’s record is ambivalent is that it is clear that it has not played much part in reconciling Britain to Europe in any meaningful way. Given what is happening to the country, with us leaving the European Union and having a greater froideur in our relations with Europe than at any time since 1945, we cannot honestly say that the Council of Europe has played much part in making us, or even our political class, more European. I am afraid that I have not read the reports to which the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, referred; all I can say is that they impinge hardly at all on the public debate in this country. As I listened to noble Lords, I wondered whether I could think of any contribution which the Council of Europe has made recently to the public debate in this country, and I can think only of one—which I will come to in a moment.

In his great first speech as chairman of the Council of Europe, Churchill said:

“It is impossible to separate economics and defence from the general political structure. Mutual aid in the economic field and joint military defence must inevitably be accompanied step by step with a parallel policy of closer political unity”.

That is the prospectus for the European Union, and it is the European Union which Britain is in the act of seeking to leave. Churchill’s own legacy and own injunction to the Council of Europe is not being honoured in Britain’s relationship either with the Council or with the other European institutions. That side is clearly very depressing.

It is therefore clear that the Council of Europe has had almost no impact whatever in reconciling Britain to Europe; it has enabled some British politicians to play a role, such as that of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in election monitoring and so on, but it has not had a more fundamental impact. A further question is whether it has played a role in instilling wider human rights, respect for human rights and democratic rights in the wider Europe. That question hangs on whether Turkey and Russia, which are the two most problematic members of the Council of Europe in terms of their respect for human rights and democracy, have a better record and whether we are able to make a more constructive contribution to engaging them in democracy and human rights as members of the Council of Europe than would be the case if they were outside and we were therefore able to be more critical. Listening to this debate, I am not sure what the answer is, and I do not think that noble Lords are sure. We have heard some noble Lords who think that we should engage more closely with Russia and others who think we should not. I am not sure. All I can say is that things are pretty desperate in both cases. We have near-dictatorships in both Turkey and Russia; there is only a figleaf of respect for democracy and human rights in both countries. However, the cause has not yet been completely lost, so maybe one can argue that it is worth continuing with the dialogue as members.

The one undoubted benefit in both cases, it seems to me, is the abolition of the death penalty. My understanding is that it is not possible to be a member of the Council of Europe and have the death penalty. If Turkey and Russia were not members of the Council of Europe, given what has happened to their politics in the last 10 and 20 years, they probably would now have the death penalty. If it is our judgment that that has been an achievement, then all the work of noble Lords in attending these endless committees from 8 am until midnight will have been worth while.