Council of Europe

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, speaks with a great deal of authority on this subject; he has become one of its leading experts and I am sure the House is grateful to him. He has spoken against a background, I would imagine, of more or less unanimity in this Chamber about the value and worth of the Council of Europe and all that it has achieved over the years. There is, however, the special anxiety that he has expressed about dealing with climate change—one of the most serious matters facing the entire planet.

He did not say so, but I assume from his analysis that the factors behind this anxiety include fears that the international financial crisis has caused great psychological depression in many countries: the recession that people now face; the threat of unemployment in different countries and the fact that, if they adjust to climate change requirements, jobs may be lost in the immediate future through that process as well; and that the emerging countries in the third world are now coming into the first world—very rapidly in the cases of India, China and Turkey. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, and I have just visited Turkey, and what an advanced country it is now becoming in all relative terms. As the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, said, they have become tired of the finger-wagging that has always been the habit of the West vis-à-vis these countries. It appears to be beginning to decline now, psychologically and politically—at least I hope so. When I was on a recent visit to India, which has naturally friendly relations with Great Britain as the former imperial power—I am glad to say there is a great relationship—one of the first things that was spontaneously said to me was that it did not want any lectures from the West on what to do about these matters; it will deal with them urgently as well and there has to be a fair international agreement. Legal force may be possible later, as the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, implied.

He was reminiscing about his history in the Council of Europe and I began to think of our history together in the European Assembly, as it was then, but the European Parliament as it is now. We both began at more or less the same time in the early 1970s when there were 184 members and a dual mandate, in all respects, of all the members from all the different countries. It was a very different, weak body. Sometimes the Commission did not bother to turn up if it was a bad day and the Council of Ministers sometimes did not turn up either or came late. Nowadays the European Parliament has developed into a powerful and impressive institution, as has the Council Europe, which is an entirely different organisation based on totally different premises.

I refer to the words contained in one of its recent publications. It states:

“The Council of Europe occupies a unique place in the international political landscape of Europe—the guardian of human rights, a symbol of hope, with the task of cultivating a Europe where democracy and the rule of law flourish and the mistakes of previous decades cannot easily be repeated. Its work is more important today than ever, covering almost the entire continent, in 47 member states and among 800 million citizens”.

We on these Benches enthusiastically support the work of the Council of Europe, based as it is on the bedrock of the four basic treaties. We need to constantly think about the treaty dealing with torture because there is far too much going on in that terrible field in the world still and the Council of Europe has a great role to play.

We have noticed the enthusiasm of the more recent members of the Council of Europe for the body and the role that they can play there. I hope, too, that the Council of Europe will play its own particular definitive role in helping towards a resolution, at long last, of the tricky Northern Cyprus/Republic of Cyprus problem. There is now a great will between Greece and Turkey, particularly, to see this problem solved and, like other bodies, the Council of Europe can make a great difference.

As my noble friend said in his opening remarks it is depressing that there is still—even among well educated politicians, including in the other place—confusion between the European Union and the Council of Europe. I was disturbed to see in recent exchanges in the Commons that some fierce, deep-seated anti-European Tory Back-Bench MPs, some of them new Members, were also getting mixed up about the Council of Europe. When someone said that it was a totally different body, they said, “Let us leave that as well as leaving the European Union”. This kind of thing is a disturbing manifestation of the modern, more brutal, politics in Britain, where socioeconomic pressures cause people to go back into atavistic thinking and nationalism of one kind or another.

I am sure that my noble friend will return to some of the points made in today’s brief debate. I conclude not by embarrassing him but by paying tribute to him on the way in which he has always sought to interweave into his ministerial answers a concentration, which I detect he feels personally, on human rights and its abuses in the world and the need for the international community to deal with them. That has been noticed in all parts of the House and we thank the Minister for his attitude, conduct and repeated assurances that that is a priority for the Government.