European Convention on Human Rights: 75th Anniversary

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, and to take part in the debate of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who gave a masterful introduction. I served for six years on the Council of Europe, and for two years I was the chair of a small sub-committee for the enforcement of European Court of Human Rights judgments. One of my Trivial Pursuit questions was: which country had failed the most applications to bring it into line? The answer I always got was Russia. I said no, so people said, “Well, it must be Turkey”. Actually, it was Italy. So the court does a valuable job.

I will add to the number of dates that have been mentioned. In 1966, Prime Minister Wilson accepted the jurisdiction of the court. That is also worth putting into the record because for 48 years, we have accepted its jurisdiction, and, in good times and bad, we have managed to survive.

I also had four years on the Venice Commission, which is another bit of international co-operation attached to the Council of Europe. For two years, I was its vice-chairman. I learned a lot about human rights because a lot of the Venice Commission references were concerned with one aspect or another of human rights. So I would also like the Government to reaffirm their commitment. I am sure they will, because that is the way I read the statements that have been made so far.

I will make two other observations. Where on earth is our Attorney-General? We never see him. He is the top law officer. I very much respect the noble Baroness who is here to reply to the debate, but, if ever there were a debate that needed the Government’s top lawyer, it is this one. I just make that point in passing.

I fully agree with a number of noble Lords who have said that the judges in the court, and the Council of Europe itself, have been busy with mission creep ever since it was set up. I recall that, when I went to Strasbourg as an elected MEP in 1979, the late John Silkin said to me, “Why do you want to join an outfit with no power?” I said to him, “John, put 435 politicians in a room and they’ll soon find it”. If you look at the reforms of the European Union—free movement, for instance, and all the rest—they date from that elected assembly.

I have one final point to make. The Government recently said that one of the problems was the

“exploitation of the

European Court of Human Rights

“by the human rights legal industry”.

The Government need to look at the legal industry. We need to find a way to do this because the judgment about chicken nuggets, which is often referred to, is a gross distortion of the work of the court. Maybe the Government could address this to see whether it is possible to issue some tighter guidance.

United Kingdom: Global Position

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Pitkeathley, and thank the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for initiating this debate. I start with a quote from Lenin: “Don’t mourn, organise.” The past few weeks have demonstrated that we need to look fundamentally at what we are organising our defences for. In particular, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, will read this debate and, if necessary, rewrite considerable portions of his report which he is about to give to the Government. I am not sure that we should be planning for war; we need more thorough planning for peace, to make sure that the voice of Britain is listened to in the world.

We are too stuck in the language of the past—the language of Bevin, Attlee, NATO and Churchill. We need to move into the future. Our future is as a medium-sized—number seven in the world—important regional power. Our home defence needs—as I would prioritise them—are the Baltics, the Nordics and the northern Europeans. We need to look, for instance, at our ability to protect our undersea assets. We need to look at playing a much more active part in the Arctic Council.

Most of all—and I recognise that this would have to be done very privately—we need an independent British nuclear deterrent. We can no longer rely on the system we have relied on up to now. We have to acknowledge that the French got it right. It will cost us quite a bit of money. Although I just told you to forget Ernie Bevin, let us remember that he said, “I want a bomb with a union jack on top”. We have to look at this as part of our defence capacity.

Yesterday, in the Times, the noble Baroness, Lady Foster of Aghadrumsee, gave a good list of Britain’s overseas commitments which still exist. We know that the only way that we could defend the Falklands is by a nuclear threat. We also know that we could not make it with the present structure of our defence forces. We need a stronger defence and an independent nuclear deterrent. We need to negotiate at least to get France and Germany into the Five Eyes agreement; it is too skewed at the moment.

There is a big challenge ahead. I am glad that, for once, I have been able to make a speech without annoying everybody. I strongly believe in British defence. We need to strengthen our military forces and our soft power, particularly through the British Council and the overseas service of the BBC. This is a huge challenge, but I am sure that the Minister—whom I congratulate on her elevation—will be up to convincing her colleagues to face it.

Rules-based International Order

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for initiating the debate. Yesterday, I met her in the lift. She said, “I’d like to thank you for your contribution tomorrow”. I said, “Hang on; wait till you’ve heard it and then you can decide”.

I have spent most of my life in some part of foreign policy. I was in the European Parliament for 25 years. I spent five years in the Council of Europe and 15 doing odd jobs for the European Commission. As such, I have seen quite a lot of the world—some 90 countries in all, some of them more times than I would have liked.

I start by giving an example from the Council of Europe. One of the problems with the international order is that it sometimes gets beyond itself. For three years, I was the chair of the Council of Europe committee for the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Of course, everybody says, “Oh, Russia never carried out any decisions”. That is wrong. The worst offender was Italy and the second worst was Turkey. The Russians were not too bad at carrying out decisions of the court that had no real political consequences. Beyond that, they were not very good at all.

I was on that committee when we debated the court’s decision to enforce prisoners’ votes in Britain, which David Cameron—now the noble Lord, Lord Cameron—said made him sick. I did quite a bit of work on this. One of the things I discovered was that most of the judges who had voted that Britain should give votes to prisoners came from countries that gave no rights to prisoners at all. Secondly, many of those judges did not understand the English prison system. In particular, they did not understand the difference between a remanded and a convicted prisoner. Thirdly, when it came down to it, they were open to negotiation. Thanks to the great skill of David Lidington, we managed to solve the case, get the judgment amended and accepted so that, once again, Britain was a country with no outstanding judgments. I mention this because there has been a lot of mission creep in international jurisdiction, which I do not think has done international law a tremendous amount of good.

The Court of Justice of the European Union and the WTO are unique in being courts committed to a very central, tightly drawn range of circumstances, but some of the other courts—including the International Criminal Court—have a tendency to go well beyond where it is sensible for them to go. I see that some noble Lords object to that. To issue an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu is downright foolish, because it will not be implemented. It undermines the authority of the court. People look at it and say, “What a bunch of jokers. Surely, they don’t expect Netanyahu to get off the plane in London and be banged up by the British coppers”.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord know that, when a warrant was issued for Kenyatta, he got on a plane, went to The Hague, submitted himself to the court and said, “I’m here to answer it. I have a defence to this”? It gave him permission to return to his country and to continue to lead it before there were eventually hearings. Why does Mr Netanyahu not do that? You have to remember that the warrant is in relation not to his conduct of the war but his refusal to allow humanitarian aid into the country to feed the population.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I claim damage for extra time, Mr Whip. I take that point, but I am making the point that the Netanyahu incident did the ICC no good at all.

My second point will also be a bit controversial. I believe that, if we are to redefine the international order, we have to bring the Russians and Chinese on board. It is as simple as that. You cannot do it without having the whole international order represented around the table. The Russians recently had their BRICS conference in Kazan. A number of Commonwealth countries were at that conference instead of in Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, because they judged it might be in their better interests. One of the problems we have is that the impact of sanctions has pulled Russian foreign trade in a southern direction. Suddenly, India, Pakistan, China and the countries in between are of far more importance to it than western Europe. We need to take that on board.

We also need to look at the way we construct the international order and give it a serious jolt because, finally, we need to look at the perception of Britain by its own citizens. As my noble friend Lord Howell, a good friend, has said in the past, capitalism has failed the young. There is an increasing distaste for democracy. My children know many people who say, “What the hell does it matter? We need someone who can get things done”. That, frankly, is one of the appeals of Nigel Farage. People look at him and think, “He’d soon sort you lot out, wouldn’t he?”

We are in a very dangerous situation. One of the questions that both major parties need to address is how to bring the younger people of Britain back into communion with them. They have fallen out of love with us. Not one of my children voted Conservative at the election —or Labour. They used to vote for both. A lot of the people in their circle have an attitude towards the two major parties—incidentally, not towards the third party—that they are finished, are past it and have nothing to offer them. They cannot offer them a house or a decent job and have frozen their tax thresholds. I think I have had enough of the extra time I claimed. Thank you all for listening.

The Ukraine Effect (European Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, for this report and the noble Lord, Lord Levene, for his valedictory speech. I am sure that he has contributed much to the House and will continue after he leaves us to make a distinguished contribution to public life.

I have reminded this House on many occasions that you can rewrite your history but you cannot do much about your geography. That is part of the problem here. The fact of the matter is that this Parliament on all sides has been very silent about what we are actually doing. We have not said, as we should have said, to the pensioners of Britain, that their winter fuel payment is exactly the same sum of money that we are sending to the Ukraine. We have not levelled with the British population at all.

I went to the Ukraine many times between about 1998 and 2014. I gave up in 2014, because it was evident to me that Ukraine was then going to fall apart. It was never a single country; it was always the country of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which we should remember was added to western Ukraine and confirmed at the Crimea conference as belonging to Ukraine, which was of course seen as part of the Soviet Union.

It pains me to say so but, if you look back in history, you can see that sanctions have never worked. They did not work in Abyssinia, and they have not worked since. I had an email yesterday—many noble Lords may have had it—from a group called Spotlight on Corruption. It was not about the Ukraine, which is pretty corrupt; it was about Britain. It says:

“Weak enforcement has long been the Achilles’ heel of the UK’s fight against economic crime”.


It says that

“the powers available to UK enforcement authorities are stronger”

but court challenges to UK sanctions have so far failed and criminal and civil enforcement has been weak.

I am not surprised, in a way. If people cast their minds away from the dancing in Samoa to the actual conference in Kazan, and the Russian group, they will see that sanctions are not working. I have Russian friends—not people in high places, but people who live in cities in Russia. They will tell you, “We’ve got round the sanctions. Yes, it’s difficult and we’ve had to make substitutions”. As one of them said, “Ikea has gone, but my uncle has managed to take over the factory, and we now have a Russian Ikea in our family”. One advantage, of course, of the collapse of communism is that capitalism has moved in to fill the gap that sanctions have caused.

We have made no attempt to discover what the real, underlying problems are. I was in Crimea before it was taken over. I was in Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol, and it was clear that, when the Ukrainian Government decided to outlaw the Russian language as a means of communication in schools they were going to annoy a lot of people, to put it mildly. Of course, one difficulty with Viktor Orbán is that Transcarpathia, which is part of the Ukraine, used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and used to have Hungarian schools there—and they were suddenly told that they could no longer use the Hungarian language. That is just glossed over; it is not reported or looked at. I am not in the least surprised that sanctions have not worked.

A new officer in the Trump Administration, Tulsi Gabbard, has said that the United States provoked the Russians in Ukraine. That is undoubtedly true. There was a lady from the State Department, Victoria Nuland, who spent years doing just that. Of course, Ukraine must be fully represented in any peace negotiations, because we do not want a “stab in the back” philosophy to grow up. Ukraine has to be there and has to accept whatever is negotiated.

From time to time, President Zelensky has demonstrated a willingness to do this, but he has been bullied and pushed around, particularly by the United States and to a lesser extent by us. The Ukraine must be part of the negotiation. It must be at the table and accept the outcome, but I am not sure that outcome is exactly what our foreign policy supremos have been driving at for the last few years. We need another look at this.