Council of Europe: House of Lords Members’ Contribution

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the contribution of Members of the House of Lords to the work of the Council of Europe.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have secured this Question for Short Debate and to welcome so many fellow Council delegates here. There was a similar debate in the House of Commons recently and there is something to be said for the delegations that travel from this House to the three international bodies, namely the Council of Europe, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the OSCE, bringing their activities to the attention of the House from time to time.

All three bodies play a valuable role in projecting Britain’s image overseas. We have been a member of all of them from more or less their foundation and this House has always had representation. We are supposed to make up one-third of the delegation but, having carefully analysed the figures, we generally fall somewhat short of that, although not by a huge amount. However, we do not fall short of one-third of the financial contribution to the delegation. If we had a Whip on our Benches, I would ask him to look very carefully at whether we could get value for money.

The size and composition of the delegations are based on the size and balance of parties in the House of Commons, not Parliament as a whole. I am sure we will hear a bit about that from a speaker from one of the Benches not represented in the Council of Europe.

My first point is that the cost of the parliamentary assembly is incredibly low. The whole annual budget of the Council of Europe costs less than the European Union spends in one day, to keep the sizes in perspective. Also, the cost of the parliamentary assembly has now gone down from €17.5 million in 2017 to €14.7 million this year. It is projected to stay at that level for the next three years.

The fact is that there is now no allowance for inflation. I am told that the two main opponents of inflation are the United Kingdom and the far-right Government of the republic of Italy. I would very much welcome the Minister’s comments on what Britain is achieving in extending its reach and influence by joining the Government of Italy in seemingly blocking the ability of the Council of Europe to expand even in line with inflation.

Since 2010, the parliamentary assembly and the Council have consistently been cut back. Some 230 posts have disappeared over that period. This means that the European Court of Human Rights will inevitably be one of the sufferers, because you cannot spread all the cuts in just one department. I would like to ask Her Majesty’s Government what exactly they are trying to do with the Council of Europe. What is their vision for its future? It seems it is part of the eternal cutting back and resentment of anything called “foreign”. That is my first question.

The second matter I want to turn to is Russia. Russia was probably rightly excluded from a number of international institutions after its intervention in Crimea and various other actions that put it somewhat beyond the pale of acceptable behaviour. It is worth remembering that the dismemberment of the Soviet Union was an extremely messy affair. It left behind a number of problems, most of which are now to be found in the frozen conflicts we are trying to unravel.

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 tonne 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.