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.

Tajikistan

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I must say frankly to the noble Baroness that I was not aware of the date of the moratorium on the death penalty, but I greatly welcome it. Indeed, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and some of my fellow Ministers have been active in carrying this message of, one hopes, the almost universal end of the death penalty to as many areas as possible. It is certainly something that we as a civilised nation believe in and we hope that that message can be spread. As to judicial training and other forms of training and technical assistance, there is a programme of help in that direction. We intend to do more, but there are limits to our resources and we must spread them as effectively as we can. These are valuable additions and we want to develop all kinds of assistance in the best way that we can.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, I have a quick question. In the past there have been discussions between the United Kingdom and Tajikistan over a double taxation agreement and an agreement on provision of investment on both sides—an investment protection and promotion agreement. Do the Government have any plans to take forward discussions on those important agreements with Tajikistan?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I will certainly look into that. The general level of trade with Tajikistan, as the noble Baroness probably knows better than me, is fairly modest, but we are keen to do more on the commercial and financial side. I will look into the issue that she raised on tax arrangements and write to her if there is more news to tell.

Diplomacy

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for introducing this very timely debate today. The noble Lord has rendered the House two services: first, in his excellent speech he comprehensively and skilfully outlined the issues concerning a properly resourced and active Diplomatic Service; and, secondly, he has reminded us of the importance that we should attach to such proper resourcing by being the embodiment of active diplomacy himself.

I also add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Monks. I thank him, too, for choosing a foreign policy debate for his powerful maiden speech. In another life, my noble friend and I used to sit around the same meeting tables, and I am happy to say that he has lost none of his highly persuasive and cogent powers of argument. He will be a huge asset to your Lordships’ House, as his speech today clearly demonstrated.

I begin by acknowledging that we on this side of the House know that all departments, including the FCO, must take some share of the impending cuts. As the G20 meeting in Seoul is acknowledging today, the international downturn is a global issue, in spite of what is sometimes said in our domestic politics. As a colleague of mine remarked to me in the Middle East a couple of weeks ago, the only countries unaffected are the ones that are not part of the global economy.

In looking at resourcing effective diplomacy in this country, I turned to the FCO’s business plan, in which the Foreign Secretary says that he has organised his department’s work with three overriding priorities: safeguarding Britain’s national security, building Britain’s prosperity, and supporting British nationals around the world through modern and efficient consular services. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bates, that these bear a striking resemblance to the priorities that the late Robin Cook articulated when Labour came into office in 1997, proving that very often there is nothing new in foreign policy. To any sensible person, they must be the cornerstone of what the Foreign Office is there to do.

The Foreign Secretary also spoke of harnessing,

“the appeal of our culture and heritage to promote our values”,

including on human rights. I suspect that for many of us that is a bedrock point without which achieving security and prosperity on a sustainable long-term basis would be absolutely impossible, as my noble friend Lady Drake suggested.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Waverley, that the Government’s energy in relation to trade is very much to be welcomed, but I know that there is concern that the Foreign Secretary’s great emphasis on trade and investment runs the risk of undermining the FCO’s work on human rights. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both warned us about that. Promoting human rights is not just right in its own terms; it is a matter of self-interest, too. Even countries where there is acute poverty see access to information and international communications as very obvious. Young people in all parts of the world have access to mobile phones and cameras, and of course televisions. They see injustice as it happens, and they see repression, the results of torture and the horror of innocent civilians caught up in warfare.

They have their own opinions about what is fair, just and decent. Working for human rights to protect those who cannot protect themselves is another hugely important factor in our efforts to maintain our security. It is part of how we develop our agenda on counterterrorism and counter-radicalisation. When I looked beyond the opening headlines in the business plan to see how the FCO would be maintaining and expanding its work on human rights, in the 24 pages that follow those opening headlines, the subject was not mentioned once. Can the Minister explain why not? How is that to be delivered if the business plan does not offer us a mechanism to do so?

One way in which the previous Government sought to deal with that kind of outreach, both at home and abroad, was through our support for the hajj. My noble friend Lord Patel has argued that the cut in support for British Muslim pilgrims is damaging. Like the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, and my noble friend Lady Taylor, I strongly agree with him. I declare an interest, because it was on my watch as consular Minister that the hajj support was introduced. Apart from the huge cut to the much-valued services to thousands of British pilgrims every year, does the Minister not realise what an appallingly negative signal that sends to the very countries that the Foreign Office is trying to impress in increasing our trade?

Do Ministers really not understand that many countries in the Middle East want a rounded relationship with the United Kingdom? They want a partnership with mutual respect and mutual understanding. I hope that concentrating so hard on trade, as the Government are doing—which I understand and, in many ways, support—does not lead to some of our friends in the Arab world to feel that we are not engaging as we should in politics and in seeking their views on interfaith issues, on the peace process, on Iran, Turkey and Somalia, and on the many multilateral institutions. If we really want trade, we have to do politics properly. That is what marks a real partnership that respects opinions as well as wealth.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Anderson that at the heart of what we are discussing today is an active diplomacy, which means people. We need active diplomats, and they need to be spread around the globe. I notice that the FCO business plan says that we shall have an enhanced partnership with India and closer engagement—I am not quite sure how that is different—with China, Brazil and south-east Asia. We shall need diplomacy campaigns, apparently—can the Minister please tell us what those are? I see, too, that the education conferences launched under the Labour Government will go global to get more students into the UK. All of that needs people and resourcing. My concern is that the commitment to review the UK's bilateral relationships and to look at something that we are calling the overseas footprint is in fact code for shutting down embassies and consulates in countries in which we do not have huge commercial interests.

The noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Janvrin, are right: shutting our embassies is simply not sensible, because events catch up with us and stuff happens. By the Government’s yardstick, it can backfire very badly commercially. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, emphasised, we need embassies to maintain our intelligence networks, for our security and to build confidence—and, yes, at a very basic level, to be ready for those commercial opportunities when they arise.

One of the passages in the business plan that I find most perplexing is what was said about consular services. The headline objective of supporting British nationals around the world is apparently to be achieved through cutting our consular services. Consular resources mean FCO staff being trained to deal with a huge variety of problems, from lost passports to natural disasters and terrorist outrages. It is hard, painstaking work, and sometimes it is heartbreaking.

In 1997, the consular services were the poor relation of the FCO, and when I was first a Minister, I was astonished that Ministers did not meet the victims of terrorism or the families of people who had been taken hostage. Officials were told to increase the numbers and provide a better service to the British public. Let us face it; most people in this country do not wake up in the morning wondering what is going to happen at an EU summit or the UN General Assembly. They are much more concerned if they cannot get consular help when they or their families need it abroad.

Let me turn to soft power. The noble Lords, Lord Parekh and Lord Hannay, emphasised its importance. The business plan states that there should be a strategy to enhance the impact of the UK contribution on conflict prevention by looking at the UK’s educational scholarships, but in a Written Statement from the FCO on 10 July, a £10 million cut was announced in this year’s programmes of scholarships. There are no Chevening scholarships in 2010-11. Soft power, so brilliantly described by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, is an enormously important building block in reconciliation and outreach, and we cannot have soft power without good networks. It all comes down to people and relationships. Often, we need our good diplomats to undertake that sort of soft power, and to do so they have to be properly resourced.

The World Service and the British Council have also been mentioned. I agree passionately with what the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, and my noble friend Lord Parekh said. The BBC World Service is a huge asset. It is envied by so many other countries, particularly the United States, Germany and France. It is trusted, it is editorially completely independent of government, and it has a huge reach that is unrivalled by that of any other country. The important point is that we distinguish between the editorial independence on the one side and the responsiveness of the UK’s national interest to talk to parts of the world that are so hard to reach otherwise. Similarly, the work of the British Council is the bedrock of our national interest. It is important that its functions are recognised and properly resourced because that allows us to have the contact in helping development in many countries in the world, particularly among young people and women.

To sum up, I was enormously pleased to have the business plan. It is very much to the Government’s credit that they have published it. It is a real mechanism for accountability. It will help us and give us a real opportunity to ask questions and to get the answers we need. I appreciate the Minister’s experience and his willingness to give answers to the questions that we pose—I sometimes wish that more of his colleagues followed his example—and I look forward to what he has to say.

China: Liu Xiaobo

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My noble friend puts it extremely well. I have a long list here of individuals whose particular problems have arisen and whose instances have been raised by our ambassador and our representatives at different times. We will continue to press for an enlargement of freedoms and human rights with the Chinese, but there are different ways of doing it and my noble friend is right: some are best done publicly while some are best done in a more sensitive way.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, perhaps I may ask two questions. First, have the Prime Minister or any member of his entourage met any Chinese dissidents in the past few days while they were in China? Secondly, does the Minister agree that members of the public who are interested in human rights in China might look at the human rights overview on the FCO website? That is exactly what I did today, and I was interested to see that the latest update was that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has discussed human rights with China’s Premier and that Foreign Secretary David Miliband has spoken to his counterpart on the same subject. Does the Minister think that that really is prioritising human rights in China?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I do not know whether the noble Baroness slipped into a time warp; it sounds as though the website did. I will look into that. When I glanced at the site this morning I thought that I saw a more up-to-date version, but strange things happen in the cyberworld of the internet. It may be that the noble Baroness was misled by the machinery of the FCO’s website. I will examine it to see what went wrong.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, the first question was on meeting dissidents.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I do not have any information on meeting dissidents. The visit is continuing and I do not know what the rest of the programme will involve. However, I will write to the noble Baroness when I have precise information on that, as opposed to the other official-level meetings about which we have already heard.

India: Commonwealth Games

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

Yes, we will certainly ask for that information to be put forward. I possibly did not fully answer my noble friend Lord Grenfell who implied that India was perhaps not the best place to hold the Commonwealth Games. The Government would disagree with him about that. There were some undoubted hiccups, but in the end the Commonwealth Games went ahead very successfully, helped cement relationships and carried forward the value of the Commonwealth network, which is the one of the most powerful platforms of the 21st century for the entire globe.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, is to be congratulated for his persistence in pursuing this question in the way that he has. Is the Minister aware of whether any money from DfID was involved in this unfortunate use of funds that should have gone to the Dalits? I wonder whether the Indian high commissioner has been asked into the Foreign Office to ascertain whether any DfID money has been involved and, indeed, whether he is satisfied that DfID money will be used for the purposes for which the British Government provide aid to India and not for other purposes, as was the case in this instance.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

Yes, we are aware of the situation, which is that no money from DfID has been involved in this situation or, indeed, has been given to the provincial Government of Delhi, although obviously DfID money goes to the federal Government, which is a different matter. No money at all is involved in this issue. As for discussions with the Indian high commissioner, we all see him from time to time and hold very fruitful discussions with him. I am not sure when he was last in the Foreign Office, but the noble Baroness can be assured that we are in constant contact.

Afghanistan

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Wednesday 27th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement and for the very helpful detail contained in it. We on this side of the House want to express our sympathy and condolences to the families and friends of the members of the Armed Forces who have lost their lives in Afghanistan. We are very proud of their courage, determination and steadfastness, and our thoughts are with those who have suffered such a terrible loss as a member of a family at this time. We also welcome the Minister’s commitment to make a Statement when the investigation into Linda Norgrove’s death is complete. She was a very brave woman who was clearly held in very high esteem, and many people would wish to have further detail when the time is appropriate.

We welcome the detail on the military deployment and the assessment that insurgency has been checked in a number of areas in Afghanistan. However, the Minister will not be surprised to know that there are still concerns about the process of security transition in Afghanistan. The Statement makes clear what NATO’s strategy is—to protect the civilian population and build up the national security forces as rapidly as possible. We all want to see our troops home as soon as may be, but we want that withdrawal to be based on success of knowing that the sacrifices made have been made on a lasting basis. Is the Minister really confident that a satisfactory security transition will be achieved by 2015, as the Statement and the Deputy Prime Minister have said? That part of the Statement must be put into the context of other parts of the Statement that say that the situation is challenging—or “extremely challenging”, as I think it says—and that the number of security incidents, particularly those involving direct fire, has increased sharply in recent weeks. That has to be worrying.

The Statement mentioned that a number of United Kingdom troops are directly involved in the training and development of the Afghan national security forces. The Statement says that that number has increased by some 320 UK personnel. Can the Minister assure us that the cost of those additional 320 individuals is in addition to the £200 million announced as being additional expenditure over the next four years? If they are not additional expenditure, they would take up a huge slice of that £200 million. I cannot be precise but, at a rough estimate, it might be anything between £8 million and £10 million a year.

I turn to the question of the elections. We were told that the final declaration on the elections would be on 30 October. However, the individual provincial preliminary results are ready and available online. Does the Minister have any assessment from those preliminary results of what the eventual outcome is? They are available online but not in English—but I imagine that those clever people in the Foreign Office would have been able to do some calculations by now.

The Minister will also be aware that the Wall Street Journal has reported that we may expect many new faces among those elected. As he said, nearly a quarter of the results are invalid because of electoral fraud. I think that about 1.3 million ballot papers have already been discounted and some 2,500 polling stations have had their results disqualified in full—that is one in seven; a very high number. There are other really awful reports that in some areas voters have been forced into polling stations at gunpoint and that individuals inside the polling stations observing what is going on—the observers and the officers in charge of those stations—have been forced at gunpoint from the polling stations while ballot boxes have been interfered with and stuffed with false ballot papers. Does the Minister have any corroboration of that from our embassy staff, who are interested in this and have observers on the ground? We all know, of course, that this sort of corruption is endemic, and that there is an argument that at least some progress is being made if it is clear that ballot boxes that have been corrupted are being taken away. Therefore, this is not an entirely gloomy picture, but it is very worrying when the level of fraud appears to be so high.

The noble Lord mentioned the Electoral Complaints Commission and the Independent Election Commission. Will the results published on 30 October be the final results that have been checked for fraud, or will they be provisional results which have to be checked again? It would be helpful to know what the status of those results will be when they are published.

On other governance issues, we have all read in the newspapers recently the alarming reports about cash going from Iran directly to President Karzai. The president himself has said that a number of countries provide funding for him in a number of different ways. However, part of the Kabul statement and the Kabul settlement stipulated that there should be proper accounting of all money received into Afghanistan. It is important that such a process is transparent—we would all agree on that—and that the money is used for proper capacity building rather than buying influence. As I understand it, all the money received from the United Kingdom is paid into the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, which is administered by the World Bank. Are all international contributions made through the World Bank; and, if not, do we know the countries that are making contributions outside the World Bank in a way that perhaps needs to be questioned more closely?

I return to the issue of women in Afghanistan. We are all aware that President Karzai has signed the Shia Personal Status Law, which, as the noble Lord will be aware, severely curtails women’s rights in some truly abhorrent ways. This is not a matter we can just wave to one side; it fundamentally attacks the human rights of many women in Afghanistan. The Kabul conference communiqué included commitments on women’s rights, the mainstreaming of gender equality and ensuring human rights and the provision of civic education. What direct communication and contact have Her Majesty’s Government had with women’s groups working in Afghanistan? There is a fundamental weakness on this point on the Government’s part. Afghanistan is a country where there is gender segregation—not throughout but in many places. The 14 Ministers of the FCO, DfID and MoD include not a single female. These are countries where authority matters. It is important to have an authoritative figure who can talk about these issues directly to the Government and to women’s groups. I hope that the noble Lord will be able to tell us something about what measures will be put in place in order to deal with those issues.

On 21 July the Minister told us of the £200 million extra funding that the Government had pledged at the Kabul conference, and I think that he confirmed at that time that it was indeed new funding. I am sure that he will be able to assure us on this point but, for the sake of complete clarity, can he confirm that the £200 million is not affected by the spending cuts? That would be helpful.

Can the Minister also give details—perhaps not now, but maybe later when he has had a chance to think about it—of the financial commitments made by other EU countries? We know how much the UK is putting in, but how much are our European Union neighbours putting into these funds, and how much is coming from our colleagues in the NATO countries and, indeed, the 40 or so countries that are reported to have participated at the Kabul conference?

The quarterly statement is enormously welcome, and I applaud the detail in it. I look forward to information being regularly received in this way. It will allow Parliament to plot progress and it is, if I may say so, an admirable example to some of the Minister’s colleagues of ministerial accountability to Parliament.

Iraq: Camp Ashraf

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I recognise my noble friend’s continuous concern on this issue. It is the concern of all of us that we do not want to see suffering, violence or worse. However, as has been acknowledged by the United Nations, the people of Camp Ashraf do not have refugee status under the fourth Geneva convention, nor are they prisoners of war under any other part of the Geneva convention. Our concern must be the concern of any civilised nation—that this matter can be handled properly. The UN does not find the idea of a permanent military force there acceptable but, as I said, it is keeping the matter under constant monitoring and we shall continue to press it strongly.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, does the Minister not agree that, irrespective of our legal obligations, we have an enduring obligation to the people in Camp Ashraf, as the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, indicated? After all, we do not hand anyone over to any sovereign power if we think that they would be tortured or in any other way mistreated. Does the Minister believe that there is any truth in the allegations that United States officials are not allowed into Camp Ashraf for inspections? I am pleased to hear that our officials have been allowed in, but will he assure us that they will continue to visit the camp? Is there any hope that in the future there will be UN inspectors in Camp Ashraf, as the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, rightly requested?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I can give hopes and intentions rather than assurances because, as the noble Baroness knows well from her own experience, this is a difficult area. Obviously, we intend to continue having access and monitoring. We intend to continue pressing the UN, which appears to be ready to visit and maintain a close eye on the situation. The overall pattern, however, is governed by the fact that this is Iraqi sovereign territory and Iraq is a sovereign state, although the Iraqis will be watched carefully by the world and will be expected to police and manage this matter in a civilised way.

Education: Marshall Scholarships

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, does the Minister recall that, in a speech at the New York Stock Exchange on 22 September 2010, the Foreign Secretary said that,

“it is this extraordinary level of personal connection that makes the relationship between our two countries irreplaceable”?

Often, those relationships that are made as students, very early in life, are so important. Does the Minister agree that the Marshalls have played a strong role in that extraordinary level of personal connection? Does he not think that, were the scholarships to be reduced any further, that personal connection would suffer, maybe not next year but in 10 years’ or 15 years’ time?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

One has to look at all the relationships as a whole. Certainly, I do not dispute for a moment that the Marshall scholarships are an important part, nor can I reject the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that their numbers have been falling. However, many other things have been increasing. As I mentioned earlier, under the Government of which the noble Baroness was a distinguished member, there was a dramatic increase in the number of US students in the United Kingdom. There are many other programmes, such as Fulbright and Gates, which make a contribution. I have to reveal to your Lordships that I stand here in the knowledge that I was supported by an American scholarship through my time at Cambridge, which may be welcome or not. Such scholarships are a feature of a whole network of relationships with the United States that we treasure greatly because we still regard the United States, through all its difficulties, as the home of liberty.

Israel: Illegal Settlers

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords—

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords—

Israel and Palestine: West Bank

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

The noble Lord puts the issue very clearly. There are the two sides. There is the question of the security of Israel and attacks on Israel, and there is Hamas, which some people urge should somehow be brought into the talks, but the question is: should it be when it is continuing provocative rocket attacks against Israel? Once Hamas takes immediate and concrete steps towards quartet principles, the matter might look different, and perhaps once it unconditionally releases Mr Gilad Shalit, ends interference with the operation of aid agencies in Gaza and ceases its rocket attacks, we might look at the matter differently. However, until then, the noble Lord’s point is very valid.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, I am sure that we on these Benches share the views that the Minister has put forward about ending the settlement freeze. However, the Foreign Secretary made another very interesting speech at the UN on 23 September, when he advocated a wider role for the UN, not only in peacekeeping but peacebuilding. I thought that that broke new ground. Do the Government have any plans to advocate the use of UN peacekeepers and peacebuilders in the West Bank?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I cannot give the noble Baroness a specific answer to that question but that indicates the trend of our thinking. Our intention is to mobilise more UN activity, just as we want to use our membership of the EU, our own bilateral contacts, our position in the quartet and indeed the role of former Prime Minister Mr Blair. All those are instruments through which pressure can be mounted. However, the noble Baroness will have to await a more specific answer.