Russian Membership of the Council of Europe

Alan Meale Excerpts

Wednesday 11th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Chope]

I will go on to explain exactly why. It is not just the view of all the UK delegation’s members that the Russian Federation has seriously violated article 3; it is also the view of a substantial majority of the Parliamentary Assembly, as evidenced by the decision in January this year to impose sanctions against representatives of Russia, and of the European Conservatives group in the Assembly, which I have the privilege of chairing. It also must be the opinion of the Committee of Ministers, which has made various declarations calling on the Russian Federation to do this, that and the other, all of which have been ignored.

[Sir Alan Meale (Mansfield) (Lab)]

I confirm that that is also the view of the majority of the Socialist group in the Council of Europe.

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for putting that on the record. I know that within the Socialist group, strong, differing views have been expressed, but the UK delegation in the Socialist group has been solidly supporting the notion that we must have application of the rules of law to the Russian Federation’s membership of the Council of Europe.

What has the Russian Federation done to put itself in fundamental breach of its obligations? First, it has illegally annexed the territory of another member country of the Council of Europe through the use of armed aggression. To make that worse, its President this week finally admitted that he ordered that annexation, and that there was no free will involved on the part of those living in Crimea. However, as recently as January this year, Mr Putin’s poodles in the Russian state Duma were trying to equate Crimea’s referendum with that the one that took place in Scotland last year and to say that the annexation was equivalent to the Federal Republic of Germany’s annexation of East Germany in 1989.

The hon. Member for Portsmouth South asked what is new, and I have here an article from a Russian newspaper, dated 28 January 2015, with the headline “Russian lawmakers to consider declaration on 1989 ‘annexation of East Germany’”. It states:

“Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, has asked the parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs to look into the possibility of adopting a declaration which denounces the reunification of Germany in 1989”.

He goes on to say that the Parliamentary Assembly’s reference to the events in Crimea was unlawful and that

“‘97% of Crimean residents voted for reunification with their motherland’”.

The article continues:

“Following the logic of those who call this historical event an annexation, the Federal Republic of Germany annexed East Germany, Naryshkin stated.”

We now know, from Putin’s words a year later, that he ordered that, so all the subsequent bluff and bluster were lies, as we knew they were at the time, and as most of us on the Parliamentary Assembly realised.

The second thing that I hold against the Russian Federation is that it has deployed Russian troops across the border in eastern Ukraine who have used and continued to use heavy weapons against the Ukrainian people. I ask the hon. Gentleman, is that not enough?

Thirdly, Russia has brazenly defied the rule of law by harbouring Andrei Lugovoy, one of its own MPs, who was involved in the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. As has become clear at the public inquiry currently taking place, Lugovoy achieved a score of minus 2 when asked during a polygraph test in Moscow in April 2012 whether he had handled polonium, yet at the time Russia claimed that the test had emphatically established his innocence. To add insult to injury, on Monday this week, President Putin awarded a state honour to Mr Lugovoy for what was described as “services to the fatherland”. That is putting the proverbial two fingers up to all the other members of the Council of Europe. What are those members doing in response?

The fourth charge that I levy against the Russian Federation is that it has refused to honour its obligations under international law to release from custody Nadiya Savchenko, who was an elected Member of the Ukrainian Parliament and a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. She was illegally abducted from Ukraine last July.

Then there is the Magnitsky case. That is a case of the Russians exercising impunity in relation to the killers of Sergei Magnitsky. A recently published book by Bill Browder, “Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No. 1 Enemy”, is, according to the inside cover,

“a searing exposé of the wholesale whitewash by Russian authorities of Magnitsky’s imprisonment and murder, slicing deep into the shadowy heart of the Kremlin to uncover its sordid truths… With fraud, bribery, corruption and torture exposed at every turn, Red Notice is a shocking but true political roller-coaster that plays out in the highest echelons of Western power.”

On the back of the book, which, not surprisingly, has been banned in Russia, there is a quote from Bill Browder:

“I have to assume that there is a very real chance that Putin or members of his regime will have me killed some day… If I’m killed, you will know who did it.”

That is, sadly, rather reminiscent of what Boris Nemtsov’s mother said before his assassination in Russia last month.

In addition to all that, there have been multiple breaches of the accession document that Russia signed when it joined the Council of Europe. As Russia is still in deliberate breach of its obligations under article 3, why is nothing being done by the United Kingdom Government to trigger action against Russia under article 8? Indeed, one might ask what the purpose is of belonging to an organisation that manifestly shows so little respect for the values espoused in its founding statute.

There are precedents for suspension or expulsion from international organisations, and I want to touch on what happens in the Commonwealth. On Monday, Her Majesty the Queen, as head of the Commonwealth, attended the annual service at Westminster abbey, and her message for Commonwealth day was that the organisation’s values are

“more important and worthy of protection than perhaps at any other time in the Commonwealth’s existence.”

The same is true of the values of the Council of Europe. The principles of the Commonwealth were set out in the Singapore declaration of 1971 and restated in the Harare declaration of 1991. In essence, they talk about peace, democracy, liberty and the rule of law.

Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth in 1995 for breaching the Commonwealth principles. It was reinstated in 1999, when it had a democratically elected President. Fiji was suspended in September 2009 for being in breach of the principles and is still suspended. Indeed, I think it has now left the organisation. Zimbabwe was suspended in March 2002. That resulted in its leaving the Commonwealth in December 2003. There are well established precedents for exercising the power of suspension from an international organisation when a member of that organisation is manifestly in breach of the principles.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hancock]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, and he presented his case extraordinarily well. I have no doubt about the merits of that case, but there is this other argument, which other Members have alluded to, that it is better to have people inside the organisation.

Would the human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe have the same facilities offered to them in Russia if Russia was out of the Assembly? I think not. Would people in Russia, who make up nearly two thirds of all the applicants to the European Court of Human Rights, have any access to redress if Russia was out of the Assembly? I think not. If the £24 million that the Russians put in, as a grand payer along with the UK, was removed from the Council of Europe, what would that do for the Court in Strasbourg?

[Sir Alan Meale]

The hon. Gentleman said that the members of the Russian delegation to the Assembly do not really care whether they have voting rights, so why do they continually campaign to get the votes back and why do they threaten in discussions in the Duma that, if they do not get their votes back, they will seek to leave the Council of Europe? Surely, voting rights are important and, as the hon. and learned Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald) said, the strength of the push towards getting the negotiation to the Council of Ministers, or to the UN or wherever, is the important factor here.

[Mr Hancock]

The simple answer to that is that the Council of Europe needs Russia more than Russia needs the Council of Europe. That is the real issue for the Russian Duma Members and I have read with interest some of the comments they have made in the Russian press since the issue in January; they make interesting reading. Those Duma Members genuinely believe that the threat to suspend Russia is a bluff, because they know that the track record of the Council of Europe on taking forceful action is pretty abysmal and they have a lot of evidence to support that line.

The hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) raised the issue of Latvia. Interestingly, the 300,000 ethnic Russians in Latvia are classed as non-citizens. If the Council of Europe believes in anything to do with human rights, how can it allow that situation to persist? It is ridiculous.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Europe (Mr David Lidington)]

I echo the comments of my colleagues who welcomed you to the Chair, Mrs Brooke, and I wish you well after you step down from the House of Commons at the forthcoming election. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) on securing and leading what has been throughout an extremely serious-minded and thoughtful debate about not only Ukraine, but the more general relationship between the United Kingdom and the west and Russia and how we should address the challenges that we currently face.

I rather agreed with my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) when he said that there has been a tendency in the west to underestimate the extent to which people in Russia see the era of Gorbachev and Yeltsin as a national humiliation. Nevertheless, I do not believe that that suggests that the west has provoked President Putin and the current Russian Government in the way that he sometimes tries to claim. When looking back over the past 10 years or so, we see an effort by western countries to try to involve Russia in those international organisations that are the core of a rules-based international order. We have seen Russia brought into the G7, which became the G8; into the World Trade Organisation and the OECD; and into organisations such as the Council of Europe, which has been at the heart of today’s debate.

The right hon. Member for Warley (Mr Spellar) was correct to remind the House that we are looking not only at Ukraine, nor even only at Ukraine and Georgia, but at a number of areas where, in recent years, Russia has demonstrated a more aggressive pursuit of its national interests and posed a greater challenge to a rules-based international system—or at least, a system that we had hoped was rules-based. He mentioned cyber attacks and the increase in air and naval activity. I could add to that list the abduction of an Estonian official from Estonian soil. He is still in prison in Moscow, where he has been for six months without evidence being brought against him. I could also add the use of energy and strategic investments as a weapon of Russian power, the 2007 suspension of Russian participation in the conventional forces in Europe treaty and the fact that, only yesterday, Russia announced that it would suspend its participation in the Joint Consultative Group, the committee in Vienna that monitors the CFE treaty.

[Sir Alan Meale]

Perhaps the Minister could add to that list trade with Armenia. Recently, Armenia agreed to move closer to the European Union, resulting in a direct threat from Russia that if it continued to move away from the Commonwealth of Independent States, Russia would instead trade with nearby partners.

[Mr Lidington]

The hon. Gentleman puts the point well, and one could add other items to that list.

We face not only a crisis over Ukraine, but an issue of principle. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, the international community, including the Russian Federation, recognised the republics that then became independent states as sovereign and entitled to determine their own future. The question now is whether we believe that that is an important principle that should be upheld for both legal and political reasons, or that Russia is justified in trying to exert some kind of informal imperium over those countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union.