Russia and the Council of Europe

Cheryl Gillan Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[John Howell]

My hon. Friend anticipates what I will say in a moment. I agree that we are dealing with a serial offender, as I said in answer to the earlier intervention. We should have taken a strong stance when Russia attacked Georgia. It came as no surprise that it then attacked bits of Ukraine.

[Dame Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is indeed making a powerful speech. Does he welcome Georgia’s being at the forefront of some of the discussions at the recent NATO conference and of a report from the special committee? Does he also agree that we ought to get on with allowing Georgia into NATO?

[John Howell]

I agree that Georgia is fit for NATO membership. I look forward—along with my right hon. Friend—to monitoring the elections there later in the year. I have no idea what I will find on the ground there, but Assembly members play an important role in monitoring elections in newly emerged democracies.

Many might also recall the motion at the last part-session of the Council of Europe, which took up the case of Ukrainian prisoners of war—as I said in the Parliamentary Assembly, the issue of political prisoners goes right to the heart of what the Council of Europe is about. However, like many resolutions that the Council of Europe has passed to condemn the actions of Russia, that motion will almost certainly be ignored. Indeed, the Council of Europe has passed so many resolutions about occupied Ukrainian territory, the rights of the people there and political prisoners, that Russia’s non-compliance can be seen only as a gesture of ill will towards the Council of Europe.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. It is also a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), who leads the Labour delegation in the Council of Europe in an exemplary fashion. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) on obtaining this timely debate. I am looking forward to hearing what my right hon. Friend the Minister from the Foreign Office has to say about this subject, because he is an accomplished Minister, but he must realise that this is a very difficult situation. My speech will be in accordance with the two speeches that went before; I have a similar perspective.

I serve on the Council of Europe alongside many of my colleagues in this Chamber. It is very ably led by the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), and my political group is led by my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger). However, I can honestly say that the group of Members of Parliament and Members of the other place who go there to represent the United Kingdom work together as a team—a very comprehensive team and one whose members complement one another. Very little politics is played in the UK delegation to the Council of Europe; we see ourselves representing the United Kingdom, rather than our independent political positions, which gives us great strength as a delegation.

As a former colleague of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley, I, too, worked behind what was then the iron curtain. We suffered similar deprivations when we went into that territory in the name of capitalism and bringing private companies into the newly emerging markets after glasnost and perestroika. I commend him for the sterling work that he did and the advice that he gave to successive UK Governments.

I think that it is useful to remind those listening in to the debate that the Council of Europe is Europe’s oldest political body. It emerged from the ashes of world war two and has been described as the

“democratic conscience of Greater Europe”.

Its commitment to upholding human rights, democracy and the rule of law across, now, 47 member states and 820 million people is remarkable.

I think my colleagues would agree that we sometimes see the dead hand of the European Union trying to take over and dominate the Council of Europe, but fortunately it fights and maintains its independence, which is absolutely right. I think that it is in many ways a more important body than the European Union, because the people who go to the Council to represent their countries are directly elected Members of the Assemblies in their countries. Also, it has a very proud history, which includes eliminating the death penalty across the 47 countries. We should all be proud of that.

As I have said before in this Chamber, I think that we should have an annual debate on the Floor of the House in Government time on the work of the Council of Europe. I hope that by reiterating the proposal—I know I have cross-party support for it—we could achieve that. At the end of every year, to be able to do a summary of what the Council has been up to would be very important.

On Monday, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said in the House of Commons that we needed to be

“clear and unwavering about where Russia needs to change its behaviour, and for as long as Russia persists in its efforts to undermine our interests and values, we must continue to deter…them.”—[Official Report, 16 July 2018; Vol. 645, c. 24.]

That is exactly what we have been seeing in the Council of Europe. As hon. Members have said, following the annexation of Crimea, the Council enforced sanctions on the Russian Federation. Six years on from the military aggression that we witnessed from Russia in Georgia, it continues illegally to occupy territory there.

We ought to be clear: there has been some confusion about this, but the Russian Federation has not been suspended from participating in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. It has taken the decision to remove its delegation from representing its credentials on the floor of the Hemicycle, following our unwavering support for the sovereignty of Ukraine, which is to the credit of all our colleagues in the Council of Europe—those from other countries as well as our own delegation.

[Mr Liddell-Grainger]

My right hon. Friend is completely correct to put it on the record that the Russians suspended themselves, but they are, irritatingly, still coming to the ad hoc committee, which my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) and I attend as well. They are coming back to the Council of Europe regularly in that guise.

[Dame Cheryl Gillan]

That is one of the confusions that has arisen, because the rules and regulations about what happens to a country that is in Russia’s position are unclear. I think that Secretary-General Jagland has a great deal of work to do to clarify the position, because the Russians coming back to the ad hoc committee has caused a great deal of consternation among many of our colleagues and not least to myself, because we cannot understand why they still have the right to sit at the table when we are in this hiatus where the money has been withheld and they have removed the rest of their delegation from participation in any of our committees and activities.

It is widely agreed that the violation of the sovereignty of states arose from an illegal referendum. I want to dwell on that for a moment, because I serve as the vice-president of the committee on political affairs and democracy and am also the rapporteur for the new rules on referendums. We have just completed a large report in this country, under the auspices of the constitution unit at University College London, looking at the rules in the United Kingdom on referendums. The independent commission on which I have served for the past nine months has come up with a series of recommendations for changes to legislation in this country. I am working with Dr Alan Renwick, who is now the international adviser to the Council of Europe’s political affairs committee on this matter, and I am working with the Venice Commission as it updates its rules on referendums, which is badly needed after 10 years, to try to bring more clarity to the situation.

That we have Russia in the Council of Europe at all is one of the key achievements of the post-cold war period. When it ratified its membership of the European convention on human rights in 1998, there was a real welcome for its inclusion, but in December 2015 it passed a law to allow Russian courts to overrule the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, because it disliked those decisions. Russia was particularly exercised, as my hon. Friend the Member for Henley mentioned, by being told to pay $2 billion to shareholders of Yukos, but there have been many judgments that have irked both President Putin and the ruling party, and some of their behaviour has resulted from that. More than one third of the cases that come before the European Court concern Russia. To put that in perspective, in 2017 the Court dealt with 8,042 applications concerning Russia. Even though 6,886 of those were declared inadmissible, it delivered 305 judgments concerning 1,156 applications, and in 293 of those there was a finding of at least one violation of the European convention on human rights. Before I arrived in the Chamber I looked up the figures for 2018, and already 5,975 applications have been allocated to a judicial formation, of which 579 have been decided by judgment. There are currently a further 9,191 applications pending a judicial formation. That is a heavy workload, and is a reflection of the human rights situation.

The Council of Europe is no stranger to the practice of bringing together representatives of countries that have political and diplomatic tensions, and it acts as an important partner in the soft diplomacy required to bring resolution to intractable problems. What we are discussing is probably one such problem. We need to seek a remedy for the situation because at the moment 140 million Russians will be denied access to the European Court of Human Rights, and that is not something to be taken lightly. We should not capitulate and accept an unconditional deal, as that would set a precedent for those countries that are often accused of backsliding on democracy. It is important that the founding principles of the Council of Europe should not be held to ransom as it faces complicated financial issues.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. However imperfect the Russian Government’s attitude towards the Court, at least there is a chance that the 144 million Russians will continue to have access to a genuinely independent human rights court. That is why Russia must maintain its place on the Committee of Ministers—so that at least there is a chance of ordinary Russians getting access to the Court.

[Dame Cheryl Gillan]

The unilateral withdrawal of the funds that are important for running the Council of Europe and the Court is to be deprecated, and I should like those funds to come back, but I do not believe we should give in to the current blackmail. We need to stiffen the resolve of the Council of Europe and of Secretary-General Jagland. Money should not be more important than the democratic principles by which we all want to live. I hope for a resolution to the problem that does not involve rolling over and giving in to the Russians.

[Several hon. Members rose—]