Georgia: Imprisonment of Mikhail Saakashvili

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I can absolutely assure noble Lords that that is exactly what the UK is focusing on in our discussions with the Government of Georgia.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

Will our Government remind the Government of Georgia that their abandonment of rule of law standards will affect the otherwise plentiful opportunities for economic and business co-operation between our two countries, not least because our Government will be bound to advise businesspeople of the danger of working in Georgia, and political risks insurers will simply refuse insurance for debts mounted in Georgia?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

The noble Lord is of course right. The broader context—the backdrop—is for the Georgian Government to act and behave in a manner that takes them forward towards their broader Euro-Atlantic aspirations. We are a firm supporter of those aspirations; we believe that further integration with the EU and NATO will deliver greater prosperity and security for both Georgia and Europe. UK programmes fully support democratic reforms and NATO interoperability aimed at progressing the Georgian Government’s aspirations.

Russia in Georgia

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

How Georgia chooses to move forward with the EU is very much a matter for Georgia. However, I can say that we are working very closely with our European colleagues on, first and foremost, the monitoring done within Georgia, particularly vis-à-vis the breakaway republics. Our ODA funding has also grown and that is helping Georgia take forward certain reforms that I have already alluded to. Specific UK funding is also helping it to build its cyberdefences, which, in the current climate, is extremely important.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

Given that Vladimir Putin is an unprincipled opportunist, can we take it that the Government are aware of the danger that the exodus into Georgia of Russians apparently wishing not to serve in the Russian forces may well include a fifth column placed there under Putin’s instructions? Will we try to ensure that such a fifth column does not do what some Russians were doing in Ukraine?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, first and foremost, on the issue of Russians fleeing forced conscription, I think that it is a recognition that the people of Russia themselves do not support what Mr Putin is doing, in his continued violation of the rights of the Ukrainian people. On the specific issue the noble Lord raises, on whatever perspectives may be taking place, and whether some coming through those borders may pose a direct threat, that is why the UK is cognisant of this. That is why we are investing in cybersecurity; I am sure that will help to build the intelligence base as we work with our Georgian partners.

Ukraine

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, on the noble Baroness’s second point, there always is a Minister at the FCDO over the summer—as I was. Some of us cancelled our holidays to ensure that we were there. I assure the noble Baroness that, even when people take deserved holidays, there is always substantial experienced cover, as will be the case for this crisis and others. On the noble Baroness’s first point, of course we are working and engaged with our G7 and NATO partners. Later this afternoon, I will leave for The Hague to look specifically at accountability for the crimes that are being committed daily in Ukraine.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the Russians are committing unforgivable war crimes virtually every day? Does he agree that any form of appeasement with that kind of regime is wholly unacceptable?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord. This is why we are working with our key partners, and with 42 other member states on issues at the ICJ. As I said, I am leaving for The Hague to meet the prosecutors from the ICC and Ukraine to see what further assistance and support we can provide to ensure that crimes are documented, that victims get the hope they need, that Ukraine gets the support it needs and that we can bring justice.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, there came a moment in this debate when I was, frankly, hoping—and so perhaps were others—for a short intermission, when suddenly there broke out a fascinating spat, to use a technical term, between the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and my noble friend Lord Kerr. Being the intellectual heavyweights that they are, they squared up to one another, face to face for a moment—although I note that, since then, after a long, private conversation, they have gone out, presumably for a reconciliatory cup of tea.

A few minutes before that, we had heard the noble Lord, Lord Frost, being as clear as he ever is. With breathtaking boldness, he rejected the efficacy of a treaty provision that had been negotiated with great care—by the noble Lord, Lord Frost. Indeed, he did so without, it appeared, a grain of apology. Although those three noble Lords are not in their places at the moment, I hope to take your Lordships for a moment to Northern Ireland and the reality of the Good Friday agreement reached on that memorable day, 10 April 1998.

Your Lordships will recall that not only was that agreement reached but it was reached after 30 years of fighting in Northern Ireland—and it was reached between parties who distrusted each other to the core. Two of those parties, the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, and John Hume, from very different parts of the Northern Ireland political spectrum, won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work. Also, following the agreement, there were two referendums on the island of Ireland which supported it. As it happens, shortly afterwards I became the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation and, in the time since 2001, I have spent quite a lot of time in Northern Ireland, in places such as Stormont, the Bar Library, Queen’s University Belfast and other pleasant places of resort in Belfast, discussing that agreement.

And what do we have? Those people who distrusted one another have tried to trust one another. Belfast is a remarkable, pleasant city now compared with what it was. The restaurants are open, the bars are open—you go to Boots and you find people from all communities working there. As one person said to me, “It’s the real parable of Northern Ireland. Sometimes they marry each other and it’s all over for them”. In truth, the effect of the Good Friday agreement has been to change Northern Ireland and its polity out of all recognition.

In my view, it is absolutely inexcusable, when plainly there are other measures available, and when the Administrations in London, Belfast and Dublin could get together and solve these problems if only they stopped talking as they are to one another. This problem can be resolved, the Good Friday agreement can remain unaffected and an agreement can be reached. It should not be done with a threat to break a treaty. The breaking of that treaty by the United Kingdom—I think that I am with my noble friend Lord Kerr rather than the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, on this—is an unacceptable breach not just of the law but of the law of nations: and what is higher in law than the law of nations?

So, in focusing on this single subject which has real international repercussions, I ask the noble Lord, when he answers this debate—we all hold him in great regard in this House—to confirm that no Government should ever make a treaty that they know at the time of making it that they may be unable to keep, and that no Government should break a treaty made with friends once it has been made, because there is always another way.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords—

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Can we hear from a woman for a change?

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that one of the ambitions of this country is that Iran should adhere to the rule of law? If so, should we not be adhering to the rule of law—and, therefore, will he now give us a very clear “yes” or “no” reply to my noble and learned friend Lord Judge’s very straightforward question, which he has yet to answer?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

Yes, of course, it is in everyone’s interest that Iran as a country adheres to the rule of law, just as the UK does on a routine and permanent basis.

Iran: Human Rights

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Hampstead, on obtaining this debate and opening it so well. He and I have made common cause on these issues for many years. There are not many opportunities to debate them and we are fortunate tonight to be able to do so in the presence of the noble Baroness, who is a senior Foreign Office Minister and who will, no doubt, be willing to answer a number of the questions put in the course of the debate. It has also been an absolute pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord McInnes, who gave a lot of colour to the historical aspects. These make the issues we are debating so depressing, because abuses in Iran have gone on for so long.

I hope that the House will indulge me for a moment in reflecting on the fact that I am speaking for the first time from this Bench. I hope it is proper for me to thank the House authorities, the Convenor of the Cross Benches and his staff for their guidance so that my move to this Bench could be made in compliance with the customs and practices of your Lordships’ House and with as little fuss as possible. I thank colleagues in this House for their courtesy in a difficult time, and I include in that members of the Liberal Democrat group which I left to come to this Bench.

Policy towards Iran has changed with the relaxation of the United Kingdom’s previously severely critical approach towards the regime. It is a matter of judgment whether one believes the asserted commitment to the deal designed to inhibit the proliferation of nuclear weapons and their development in Iran. In so far as trust has been reposed in the Iranian theocratic regime, I hope that this is justified, though personally I doubt it. I would welcome hearing from the Minister what evidence there is to corroborate whatever confidence our Government have in the integrity of the regime on the nuclear issue or, for that matter, any issue. I have followed Iranian affairs quite closely for a number of years and I have seen absolutely no evidence to support the view that the regime is truthful. Indeed, it appears to be as unfamiliar with the concept of truth as it is with the concept of trust.

One of the benchmarks of trust is the attitude of the Government concerned to human rights. Theirs is a Government with a plainly threadbare approach—even a scorched-earth one—to human rights. There is international evidence in abundance, not least from the United Nations, to support that view. Others in this debate have already spoken about this human rights record. I will provide six headline points, though I could have made 66. First, trials take place in Iran without legal representation, even in capital cases. That would be unbelievable about any modern state if it were not, unfortunately, true. Secondly, defendants are convicted, and lose their appeals, without being told the charges they face. The concept of appealing against a conviction and losing the appeal without ever even seeing the charge is just an abomination in the modern world. Thirdly, children are subject to the death sentence, which can be carried out when they reach 18 years old—well outside international human rights norms and treaty requirements. Fourthly, in a gruesome peculiarity of their law, girls in Iran can be sentenced to death at nine years old, whereas boys can be sentenced to death at 14. Obviously, no juvenile should be sentenced to death in any state—it is barbaric—but the extraordinary disparity between boys and girls is one of the many examples of a total disregard by the Iranian Government of international obligations, juristic norms and equality of the sexes.

Fifthly, Iran imposes its laws and violence wherever it can spread its influence. The noble Lord, Lord Clarke, referred to Camp Ashraf. The Iranian Government have been responsible for multiple missile attacks at that camp and its successor, Camp Liberty, on innocent, unarmed and in many cases elderly refugees from Iran to Iraq, killing many. I have been to Albania and spoken to many of those refugees and the story they have to tell justifies the use of the word horrific. The role of Iran in Syria is extremely questionable at best. My sixth point is: who is in charge of justice in Iran? As the noble Lord, Lord Clarke, said, the Justice Minister is Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who was instrumental in the 1988 massacre of no fewer than 30,000 political prisoners. Justice in Iran is supervised by a war criminal. How on earth can we pay any credence to a Government who have a war criminal as their Minister of Justice?

I turn briefly to some specific cases, specifically those of the dual nationals Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Kamal Foroughi, which have been mentioned already. Mrs Ratcliffe has been taken away from her family; she has a two year-old who was not allowed to leave Iran to live with her father, Mr Ratcliffe, in the United Kingdom. Without going into the facts further, I ask the Minister whether the Government can confirm that they have not only been protesting against what has happened to Mrs Ratcliffe but calling for her release in their discussions with their Iranian counterparts. It is extremely important that that should be done. Failure to call for her release may indeed be a misuse, at least, of administrative action. I ask whether the Foreign Secretary will make a public statement calling for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and the 77 year-old Kamal Foroughi to be released.

I remind your Lordships that Kamal Foroughi is a British Iranian serving an eight-year sentence in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran on charges of espionage and possession of alcohol. He was arrested in 2011 and kept in solitary confinement, then convicted at an unfair trial at which he was not properly represented. He did actually see the charges brought against him—the day before the trial. The authorities have barred him from legal advice and much contact with his family, and he has been denied consular assistance. According to Iranian law, a prisoner can be released after serving a third of their sentence, yet he has been in prison for more than five years. That is typical of the arbitrary and inexcusable way in which these cases are treated. Again, I ask the Minister whether she will take up this case and call for his release.

My final point is that the 10 recommendations in the UN special rapporteur’s report of 30 September 2016 have been ignored. What are the UK Government going to say and do about that?

Syria and the Middle East

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for initiating this very important debate and for doing so with such concise clarity. I remind the House that I am the joint chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Iran Freedom and that in a professional capacity as a lawyer I have advised on connected matters. I am aware that a lawyer stepping into a foreign policy debate may be about as welcome as the converse in your Lordships’ House. Nevertheless, I want to raise some issues on Syria, Iran and Iraq, following on from the comments just made by the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, with whom I agree.

As far as Syria is concerned, as I was thinking about this debate I reflected on Syrians I have known in my life. They have been almost entirely clever, enlightened and resourceful people. Then I reflected on the experience of one of my daughters of being in the sixth form at a school in central London with a popular and very able young student of Syrian origins who is in fact now the wife of President Assad. So some of these issues of Syria come very close to our own experience and they are a shock to us as well. It is indeed shocking that a country full of great history and future potential should be ripped apart by the events that we observe daily. The outrages of the Assad Government are there for us all to see and wholly unjustified. However, we must be careful what we wish for.

My noble friend Lord Howell illustrated the complexity of the political situation in Syria. The rise of heretical, violent jihadism there, clearly financed and fuelled by the Government of Iran, presents a real danger if there is to be regime change in Syria at some point in the future. I also agree with what was said earlier: it is not for us or for the Americans to determine what sort of regime they have if there is a change in Syria, because our models are not necessarily suitable for them, and I agree entirely with the realism expressed earlier by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, on that subject.

It is, of course, in the end for the people of Syria to determine what Government they have, but whatever enabling we do must be aimed at increasing the prospects of sound, enduring government—not necessarily a western model—preferably secular but, above all, pluralist and with a secure and internationally compliant legal system. We all want to welcome Syria after a very long time back into the family of nations with whom we can walk together, whether in the United Nations or elsewhere.

I turn next to Iran. Of course, I support, as I suspect everybody in this House supports, the attempts to negotiate and negate the threat of Iranian nuclear ambition. I share the assessment of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, on the importance of that process. I agree with my noble friend Lord Lamont that it is important that there should be business contacts, and they should be legitimate and carefully scrutinised. Equally legitimate and important are sanctions where there are appalling human rights breaches. Although other countries in the world have similar levels of breaches of human rights, few countries with the civilised traditions of Iran have such a high level of human rights breaches. We see these breaches daily. More than 600 executions have taken place in Iran in the past six months, most of them in public—hanging people from cranes. Many of them have not committed criminal offences that we would recognise. Some of them are merely political dissidents. As recently as last Wednesday we heard an announcement by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Iran that appeared to commend cutting off one hand and one foot of a prisoner. Surely those are practices that we not only condemn and abhor; they should feature in our negotiations with Iran if there is to be any genuineness in that process.

Nor should we allow the impression that President Rouhani is some kind of Iranian Gorbachev—a view that I believe is gathering credence. He is not. His personal history as head of the security apparatus over many years belies that assertion and the conduct of his Government does not support that proposition. Can the Minister assure the House that the strongest possible representations are being made to the Government of Iran that these human rights abuses are not acceptable and that one cannot simply look at the nuclear issue on its own? If Iran is to be accepted into the family of nations, to which I referred earlier, those human rights abuses have to be dealt with. My noble friend Lord Lamont referred to the large number of American PhDs in the Iranian Government. Even American PhDs allow one to understand that hanging people in public from cranes for non-criminal offences is simply not acceptable in a country that is negotiating with the western world.

Finally, I turn to Iraq, particularly to the residents of Camp Liberty, and formerly of Camp Ashraf, as mentioned earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, and the noble Baroness, Lady Turner. There are Iranian dissidents in refuge in Camp Liberty in Iraq. They are persecuted daily. This week they have been refused access by officials of the Iraqi Government to medically prescribed therapy. In the past they have been refused access to communications; they have been refused access to water; they have had their defensive walls removed from around their premises; there have been more than 150 assassinations there; and they have been unprotected by the Iraqi Government. One well understands the difficulty that the Iraqi Government face in relation to terrorism in that country, but it is absolutely clear that Prime Minister al-Maliki for this purpose is a client of the Government and regime of Iran. That is why the residents of Camp Liberty are not being protected.

They do not want to stay there; they wish to go elsewhere. I have been to Albania to meet some of them because Albania has allowed some 200 former Camp Ashraf residents to settle there. I have heard genuine and moving testimonies from individuals. Most of them are middle-class business and professional people, not firebrand revolutionaries. Quite a few of them are old. They need to be treated on a humanitarian basis. We are not treating them that way at the moment, nor are many other countries. It is ironic that Albania is doing so; it is one of those Governments that are treated with a good deal of disdain by the Governments of the European Union. The residents have a complete lack of protection. They are supposedly being looked after, to an extent, by the United Nations, but United Nations officials—like Macavity—are never there when critical events occur. As a result, a humanitarian scandal has erupted.

I urge the Minister to declare very clearly to this House this afternoon that the United Kingdom is in the forefront of international efforts to save the lives of the residents of Camp Liberty and to give them a safe haven elsewhere. I believe that Prime Minister Maliki does not wish to remain a client of the Government of Iran but he needs an awful lot of help if he is to be able to separate himself from the wishes of that Government. If the Iranian regime has any interest in persuading us of its earnest in meeting our concerns over nuclear and other issues, surely the small question, in quantum terms, of the residents of Camp Liberty is one on which they could demonstrate their earnest at no risk to themselves and gain the respect of the rest of the world for their change and their humanitarian approach. I ask our Government to use every effort to ensure that those unfortunate people are protected.

Bangladesh: Human Rights

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, perhaps I may take a minute in the gap of this important and timely debate. I have been taking an interest in the war crimes trials in Bangladesh. As a result, the Bangladesh law Minister, Shafique Ahmed, came to see me recently at his request. I asked him if I could take a group of senior lawyers of all parties from your Lordships’ House to see the war crimes tribunal and to have open access to everyone concerned, including the defendants in their place of incarceration. He agreed to this in principle and was very clear about his agreement. But that was done orally. I now await written confirmation that that can take place.

However, I have been awaiting that written confirmation for a considerable time, which is beginning to concern me. I would be very grateful if the Minister, in her response to this debate, would confirm that it is the Government’s view that such a visit would be timely; that it would give the potential to assess properly the war crimes tribunals; and that the Bangladesh Government should be encouraged to comply with the oral assurance that they have already given.