Council of Europe: House of Lords Members’ Contribution

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Balfe on securing this important debate on a great British success story; namely, the creation of the Council of Europe and the contribution made by UK Members of both Houses of Parliament. The whole United Kingdom delegation is highly respected in Strasbourg.

I want first to thank two noble friends: my noble friend Lady Wilcox, who suggested that I apply to join the Council in the first place, and my noble friend the Chief Whip, who had the courage, if not the wisdom, to appoint me.

I can assure the House that every noble Lord on the Council serves on at least one committee and they more than pull their weight—I am amazed at the work they do. All the committees spend an awful lot of time drafting reports—far too many, in my opinion—and those reports get a fair bit of coverage, but they are not the most important thing that colleagues do.

The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, works on the Venice commission. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, is on the committee which selects judges for the Court of Human Rights—I am a part-time substitute for him on that committee. The noble Earl, Lord Dundee, had a role in a seminal report on culture and the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, was selected to lead the delegation to monitor the elections in Ukraine last weekend. Of course, Ukrainians had walked out of the assembly in rightful outrage at the wrongful decision to readmit Russia, but it was the first time that a Peer had been selected to lead an election monitoring mission. These tasks are much more important than the reports, although not many people know that, as Michael Caine might say.

Having a great interest in elections and how they are run led me to apply for election monitoring. Last year, facilitated by the wonderful staff who organise election monitoring, the Council allowed me to travel to many countries. I was part of the team which monitored elections in Azerbaijan, then Turkey, then the stunning Georgia, then that failing state Bosnia-Herzegovina, and then the presidential elections in Ukraine in March this year. I could not manage to do Armenia and I did not think that my other, little dinky wheelchair could cope with the snow in Moldova in February—so I chickened out of that one.

In all these missions, we published our findings on whether elections were free and fair using international standards. In nearly all cases they were not, Turkey being a perfect example of a stolen election. The irregularities on the day were minor, but the dirty work had been done in the two to three years beforehand: locking up without trial one’s main opponent, owning or controlling 90% of the media, abusing all state resources for the political campaign, and banning any candidate, except Erdoğan, from appearing in a photograph with the Turkish flag. Other countries monitored also had rich oligarchs using their wealth and power to sway the results.

Such election monitoring missions are a crucial part of the work of the Council of Europe. The missions help to ensure that the universal values upheld by the Council of Europe are more widely known and that European states are committed to democracy, the rule of law and human rights. I understand that, since 1989, the assembly has observed more than 140 parliamentary and presidential elections in Europe and sent more than 1,800 parliamentarians to monitor them.

Let me thank the brilliant team in Strasbourg who organise the election monitoring missions: Daniele Gastl, Anne Godfrey, Franck Daeschler, Chemavon Chahbazian, Bogdan Torcatoriu and Sonia Sirtori—and there may be others. Not only do they draft reports for us but they organise all the teams to visit polling stations, and I am particularly grateful that they go out of their way to find accessible polling stations for me to get to in my little wheelchair. There is one other person whom I should mention. A brilliant number-cruncher from Sweden, Anders Eriksson, stays up all night of an election and number-crunches the hundreds of reports that we send in during the day. By 8 am next morning, he has a detailed analysis of every single thing which went right and wrong. That is what makes our reports so authoritative.

Finally, let me thank Nick Wright, the long-suffering secretary of the UK delegation, and his team for their fantastic work in getting all 28 of us—not just Peers—to more than 100 meetings all over Europe, with all of us travelling at different times in different ways. That is another great British success story. I laud the work they do in helping us make the Council of Europe so successful.