Council of Europe

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the debate so enthusiastically and all noble Lords who have participated. They demonstrated the considerable expertise in this House on the Council of Europe, not least through the direct experience of many of your Lordships of how the Council works, some I note going back more than 50 years, as my noble friend Lord Anderson ably demonstrated.

Without exception there has been huge appreciation of everything that the Council of Europe has achieved in the past almost 60 years but your Lordships have also asked pertinent questions about future priorities. Foremost among those are the questions raised a moment or two ago by the noble Lord, Lord Low, about the funding of the international NGOs. We all look forward to what the Minister will say about that.

I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, for her exposition on how the Council of Europe has been pivotal in establishing what she called a common European legal space in terms of its framework on issues such as torture and the conditions in which prisoners and detainees are held. I thank her most warmly for the excellent work that she has done and continues to do in this field.

I turn first to questions about the institutions and the Council of Europe itself. As I understand it, the Parliamentary Assembly includes 18 British parliamentarians and 18 substitute British parliamentarians whose advisory function is not binding on the Committee of Ministers—the ministerial council—which is, in effect, the executive body of the Council of Europe as a whole. I think that that distinction is right—the relationship between the Parliamentary Assembly and the Committee of Ministers is, I think, on the one hand an Assembly that makes recommendations and on the other a decision-taking body.

The Minister talked about looking at these issues when the British chairmanship begins in November next year. My question is born of genuine interest—I am not trying to put forward any particular agenda. Will the Minister say whether any thought has been given to trying to ensure that when the Committee of Ministers does not agree with the recommendations put forward by the Parliamentary Assembly there should be an obligation to explain the differences between their thinking and the thinking of the parliamentarians who are there to advise them?

The Council of Europe has a number of different bodies, some of which are well known, such as the European Court of Human Rights, while others, such as the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, are perhaps much less well known and their functions rather less obvious. That raises more tangentially the same sort of point made by my noble friend Lord Prescott. Presumably, we send representatives to all these bodies, but will the Minister say whether that is the case? I am sorry not to know, but these are pertinent questions that all lead to the same point, which is inevitably about the way in which the Minister thinks that the British chairmanship will scope its review of what the Council of Europe should do in future.

I am sure that many of us read the interesting article in today’s Financial Times, entitled:

“Leaner Foreign Office sheds jobs and sites”.

It went on to quote an interview with Simon Fraser, the Permanent Secretary at the FCO, about the projected 10 per cent reduction in the FCO workforce over the next few years. We discussed the resourcing of active diplomacy in the FCO in the excellent debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick, last week. In terms of today’s debate, I wonder how much the FCO is currently paying towards the running of the Council of Europe, both in the subvention that is made directly and in support of MPs and Members of this House who go to the meetings in Strasbourg. Can the Minister please supply the House with figures on the subvention and separately on the costs that I have mentioned? I do not expect him to do that today but I hope that he will put some figures in the Library in due course.

The Council focuses much of its efforts and discussions around an agenda which is of enormous interest generally across this Parliament but particularly in this House, such as the European Court of Human Rights and, of course, the issues of the political focus on those human rights with the accession of Europe’s post-communist democracies, so ably described by the noble Lord, Lord Dykes. Moreover, there is now, of course, a well-scripted agenda around terrorism, organised crime, money laundering and, as the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, pointed out, human trafficking, as well as the environmental issues about which my noble friend Lord Prescott spoke. All these issues play to the heart of the agenda which Foreign Office Ministers have very ably laid out in the business plan that the Foreign Office has published. It is, indeed a familiar agenda to all of us.

I now raise some specific issues which, if the Minister is not able to answer now, he may be able to answer in writing later on. The first concerns the discussions in Paris on 15 November on the social charter and the relationship between poverty and human rights. What is the Government’s view on the best way to mark the 20th anniversary of the European Social Charter next year? Do the Government agree with the view of the Social Affairs Committee of the Council of Europe that the year should be marked by an assertion of what it called the indivisibility of social rights and civil and political rights? If so, how does he answer the very clear and unambiguous points put just a moment or two ago by the noble Lord, Lord Low?

The Paris meeting put forward trenchant views about the relationship between poverty and the denial of human rights. Do the Government agree, for example, that bad housing, poor education and job insecurity lead directly to social exclusion and therefore undermine human rights? When we talk about human rights, the rule of law and democracy, many of your Lordships spread the definition of these concepts. How far does the Minister take the definitions of what the Council of Europe should be looking at in the future?

During the Turkish chairmanship of the Council of Europe, their priorities were reform of the Council, reform of the European Court of Human Rights, strengthening independent monitoring mechanisms and the EU’s accession to the European Convention on Human Rights. Those are pretty comprehensive objectives for the Turkish chairmanship over the current year, but I was pleased to note that they were, to some extent, picked up by what the Minister said he thought the priorities would be when this country takes over the chairmanship in November next year. He specifically asked us to think about the budget and pushing down costs, saying negotiations were well advanced on that; he talked about reform of the European Court of Human Rights, another recurring theme in this debate; and he also said that the British chairmanship should focus on what the Council does best, in terms of human rights, the rule of law and democracy. These are all laudable objectives, but the whole point is how we define them.

For example, what view do Her Majesty’s Government take on the paper, prepared in June this year, Democracy in Europe: Crisis and Perspectives, which stated clearly that the recent world economic crisis has accentuated what it called a crisis in democracy? In particular, the report cited what it described as,

“highly centralised executive decision-making and global negotiation mechanisms with little parliamentary control and insufficient transparency”.

It went on to talk about,

“a disinterest in the current institutionalised procedures of democracy and a crisis in representation”.

I could not help reflecting on that in terms of some of the constitutional issues we have recently discussed in your Lordships’ House, particularly, I am bound to say, in relation to government plans for what I think is an extravagant use of Henry VIII clauses to overturn some primary legislation which has passed through both Houses in this Parliament. Is not the real test of the Council of Europe not so much what the Council of Europe has done, but what it should do now?

We all agree that it has had a hugely influential—a crucial—role in establishing democracy, the rule of law and human rights throughout Europe. The question now is: how do we define what it should do next? There is the debate about society's security versus personal freedom; women's rights versus what some people conceive to be the right way to approach medical ethics; the important questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, on domestic violence; and the vital question of the relationship between poverty and civil rights.

The British chairmanship of the Council of Europe next year is a real opportunity for the United Kingdom. It is a real opportunity for the coalition Government to shape the future functions of the Council and to press the Government's stated ambitions for security and prosperity through the spread of the values of human rights—which are, of course, the bedrock of the Council of Europe—but also to look at other questions: poverty, social inclusion and civil rights. The Europe that most of us have grown up in is so much better than the one that our parents grew up in, in the rights that we have as individuals and our place in society. Now is the opportunity to look ahead at what mechanisms we have to ensure that the Europe that our children and grandchildren grow up in is better than the one that we inhabit today.