Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope.

I spent my time as a graduate student studying a relatively small and understudied parliamentary assembly, as it was originally known. It was the European Parliament, which gradually gained rather more powers. Assemblies can gain powers and become more influential and better known. On the other hand, we need to make sure that, however important these assemblies are, they do not become the focus of opprobrium in their own right. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, in opening this debate, and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, about the OSCE’s role and the fact that it is rather understudied and little understood.

It is slightly strange to be standing here in a Question for Short Debate where we have only six speakers. For people looking at Hansard, the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, said that we need to put some things on the record. During the period of the virtual Parliament, it was almost impossible to get one’s name down for a Question for Short Debate, so attractive was it to everybody to speak in one. If you were lucky, you had a minute to speak. Today, we have six speakers in an hour. In preparing my remarks, I wondered whether I had nine minutes of comments to make, because we have relatively few people wishing to contribute.

However, as the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, pointed out at the start of the debate, it is important to put on record why the OSCE mattered in the 1970s and why it still matters in the 2020s. It is one way of bringing states together. The noble Lord pointed out that the technical version is not a member state and is not the same as a member of the European Union, where the role of a formal signatory state is clearly delineated. These are participating states, but they range from the United States all the way to Russia. In many ways, that creates huge advantages and disadvantages. The noble Lord also talked about consensus, which I will come back to in a moment.

Clearly there are real questions about how an organisation of 57 countries, which include Russia, many central Asian countries and Turkey, can have the same values and aspirations. Here, I suspect that there is a strength and a weakness. When the 57 come together, the OSCE talks about human rights. If that is the case, is it not the perfect venue for us to talk to Russia or Turkey about human rights—or, indeed, for us to talk to our erstwhile partners in the European Union about human rights, press freedom and freedom of the media? The Library briefing talks about this; the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, also mentioned it.

Will the Minister tell the Grand Committee how far Her Majesty’s Government think that the OSCE could be a forum in which we begin to explore press freedom? Several countries that are members of the OSCE, even if they are current members of the European Union, are not necessarily countries that are renowned for their freedom of the press. Hungary—I am hoping to catch the eye of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, to confirm that Hungary is a member of the OSCE, and he has. I read through the 57 and did not want to accuse a country of being a member when it was not. Hungary signed up to all the Copenhagen criteria for membership of the European Union, signed up to the Council of Europe and is a member of OSCE—but under Viktor Orbán it is not renowned for its media freedoms. Is the OSCE then a way of having a venue to talk to Hungary about having a more open media framework, not all run by Fidesz?

Similarly, Turkey is a member and a NATO ally, yet it is a country where human rights are perhaps not respected in way that we would want them to be. Again, can the OSCE be an area where the Minister and his colleagues could have bilateral conversations in the margins? If part of the aim is not just to monitor democracy but to look at freedom of the media, these are two examples of where greater activity could be an opportunity.

I said I would come back to the issue of consensus. The Library briefing reminds us that decisions are taken by consensus. The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, pointed out that it might be “consensus minus one”. We know from the European Union that when decisions have to be taken by consensus and two member states perhaps have decided that they are not too bothered about the rule of law and are not necessarily signed up to the values that other countries espouse, they can very quickly and easily block things. I can absolutely see that decision-making by consensus can be a problem, and clearly there is a need for discussion and, one hopes, persuasion. So, in terms of brokering consensus, can the Minister tell us how Her Majesty’s Government view their role in helping broker consensus on issues that matter to the United Kingdom?

I have a word of warning: be careful what you wish for. The OSCE may move away from consensus. The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, mentioned the budget and a set of things where over the years the United Kingdom was so good at stalling activity in the European Community, later the European Union. Well, if you move to qualified majority voting, which is what happened in the European Union, you might be able to expedite decision-making, but that does not necessarily mean that, once taken, the decisions will be implemented. Countries that have been outvoted—we have seen this with the Visegrád countries on refugee issues—might simply say “We didn’t vote for it”, “We abstained” or “We were out of the room”, and they will not necessarily implement decisions. So I suspect that consensus is probably here to stay.

My final question is: “To what extent does the Minister feel that the OSCE offers an opportunity for the United Kingdom to have those side conversations that we used to be able to have within the European Union—our conversations with 27 partners which we no longer have on quite such a regular basis?” It has obviously been a very long time since Nick Clegg as Deputy Prime Minister attended a heads of state—sic. I do not think we would envisage Her Majesty the Queen attending, but even a head of government? Could we envisage such an event by 2025? Would the current Prime Minister wish to lead such a delegation, assuming that the head of state would not? Would the Minister wish to encourage the Prime Minister to do so? Or should we perhaps be thinking that the Minister would be the perfect leader of such an event, perhaps to host the event? At the same time, I reinforce the suggestion made by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, that the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, would be fantastic suggestion to be the leader of the parliamentary delegation.