Council of Europe: House of Lords Members’ Contribution

Earl of Dundee Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Dundee (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking my noble friend Lord Balfe for introducing this debate. I will touch briefly on three points: the type of pattern which is evident when we look at the contributions of House of Lords Members to the Council of Europe; why this work has been of such high value; and the ways in which it should now be sustained and continued.

After the collapse of the Iron Curtain, a key challenge was how to assimilate the states previously within the Warsaw Pact. After 1990, all of these states were keen to join the Council of Europe. The pragmatic formula for it was put in place by Lord Finsberg when he became president of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly from 1991 to 1992. Straight away, ex-communist European states could be guest members without voting rights. However, to become full members they would have to be monitored over time. This ensured that before becoming so, they would have sufficiently met Council of Europe standards for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It was a huge achievement.

Assisted by that achievement during the 1990s, the affiliation was able to grow to its present number of 47 states espousing Council of Europe values. Thus, while it includes the EU’s affiliation of 28 states, the council still outnumbers the latter by a further 19. In the 1990s, groups of three parliamentarians monitored the status of applicant states; in my case that of Croatia, whose current Foreign Minister many of us were delighted to witness being elected last month as the Council of Europe’s first Secretary-General from its post-1990 member states. Along with Lord Finsberg, Lord Russell-Johnston, who was parliamentary president from 1999 to 2002, is also now recalled with much gratitude by all new member states for his encouragement to them to play an active part.

The first Earl of Kilmuir, David Maxwell Fyfe—best known as Lord Chancellor from 1954 to 1962 yet also for his earlier skilful and even-handed conducting of the Nuremberg trials—in 1950 chaired the committee which drafted the Council of Europe’s central document: the European Convention on Human Rights. Over the 70 years since 1949, Members of this House have consistently made significant impacts. Today, limited time allows me to mention only a few examples concerning present and recent colleagues. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, visited Grozny several times and prepared until 2003 a number of reports on the war in Chechnya for the political affairs committee, which as a result was able to determine the parliamentary assembly’s position towards Russia at that time. The late Lord McIntosh of Haringey was the assembly’s first rapporteur on media freedom and created the Council of Europe’s platform for the protection of journalists. The position of general rapporteur on media freedom is now ably held by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes.

There is probably a corollary: that the Council of Europe’s consensual priorities of democracy, human rights and the rule of law will in any case tend to guide in a certain direction the energies and attitude of mind of its parliamentarians towards their work. Such priorities, transcending party politics as they do, instead inspire a collegiate and constructive approach. To a large extent, this applies at three levels: between Council of Europe parliamentarians internationally; within the Commons’ and Lords’ UK delegation itself; then cross-party between Members here, not least since working together cross-party and effectively is one of the proven qualities of your Lordships’ House in the first place.

Finally, in view of Brexit, the United Kingdom should be very grateful that our membership of the Council of Europe will nevertheless continue. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, has already observed, in that connection does my noble friend the Minister agree that we must become much more proactive in understanding what the Council of Europe has to offer, then in identifying new opportunities and carrying them out?