Russia and the Council of Europe

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Russia and the Council of Europe.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I thank the many members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe who have joined me to discuss this issue. It is a great pleasure to see them, and I am grateful to them for turning up to speak.

I start the debate by making two declarations. Neither is required for financial reasons, but they will offer some context to the debate. First, I am a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. To set the scene a little, the Council was established to promote the rule of law, democracy and human rights throughout post-war Europe. It is no less relevant today than it was 70 years ago. It has become the premier human rights forum in Europe for its now 47 member states. That will be important when we discuss Russia.

The Council is a bicameral institution, with member countries from across the wider Europe—not just the European Union—including Turkey and countries from the former Soviet Union, such as Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, some of which I will mention during my speech. It also includes a number of partners in democracy and other observers, including Japan, the US, Mexico, Canada, as well as other important countries, such as Israel, and the representatives of the Palestinians.

The Council also has a relationship with a number of other institutions, including the European Court of Human Rights. It is important to remember that the Assembly elects judges to the European Court of Human Rights, which gives the judges, and therefore the whole Court, significant democratic legitimacy. That will also be relevant when we discuss Russia.

If the United Kingdom is to be part of the wider Europe, the Council offers a tailor-made vehicle for doing so. Rather than seeking to reinvent the wheel, we need to strengthen and to maximise the UK’s unique status within the Council, including on matters relating to Russia.

The second thing I wish to declare is that, before entering Parliament, I was the principal private adviser on matters eastern European, including the former USSR, for successive UK Governments of both colours. In that role, I helped to set up and steer the technical assistance programmes that helped those countries to develop. We worked on a range of activities, including on privatisation throughout the region.

Russia is also a member of the Council, but it has chosen not to put its delegation forward to the Assembly for approval. That is worth repeating: Russia has chosen to absent itself from the Assembly by not allowing its delegation to be questioned and approved, presumably for fear of the reaction to its continued occupation of large parts of Ukraine—not only Crimea, but eastern Ukraine, including Donbass.

Russia subsequently chose not to pay the Council its annual dues, which, as a grand payeur, were originally set at €33 million, so the Council is running short by €33 million. The Council is now under tremendous pressure to readmit Russia so that it will start paying again. In other words, we are being asked to sacrifice principle for cash.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

To be absolutely fair, we took away Russia’s voting rights.

[John Howell]

The Council took away Russia’s voting rights because of the invasion of Ukraine. That was not the first time Russia had done something like that; we are dealing with a serial offender. It has now also lost its right to elect judges to the European Court of Human Rights, following its annexation of Crimea and its action in eastern Ukraine. The Russian ambassador to the Council wrote that it was the “free choice” of the people of Crimea to become part of Russia and that the Assembly had so restricted the rights of its representatives that they could not continue. The first part of that is, frankly, laughable.

It is possible to argue, with the benefit of hindsight, that when the USSR broke up, we should not simply have accepted the countries based on the former component states of the USSR. However, to do otherwise would have complicated an already complex situation and would have delayed the emergence of independent nation states. I remember discussing this issue at the time and passing it by.

Russian activity in the Donbass and in Crimea has badly affected the human rights of Ukrainians there, some of whom are held as political prisoners. Members may recall our opportunity to meet Nadiya Savchenko—an Assembly member and Ukrainian air force pilot who had been imprisoned by the Russians. She addressed the Council after her release. Whether one agrees with Nadiya Savchenko’s politics is irrelevant; the fact is that she gave a moving account of her imprisonment by the Russians.

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[John Howell]

I will come on to that, but I wonder whether the hon. Lady means that we should consider admitting Russia or excluding it. I put the Novichok case to the Croatian Prime Minister during the last public session of the Assembly, and I asked whether he thought that his decision to send away a Russian member of the Foreign Office based there was justifiable. His response was that the evidence Britain had produced was so strong that he would do it again. That is important.

Crimea is not the only source of disagreement. The Council of Europe has passed a resolution about the serious, systematic and widespread persecution, discrimination and harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Chechnya, which has caused more than 100 people to flee that country. The Council of Europe called on Russia to conduct an independent national investigation, and for the extreme discrimination to end, but Russia has done nothing.

We have already mentioned Georgia, and the Council of Europe has criticised Russia for the abuse of human rights in the occupied regions. That abuse effectively extends to the use of war in that country, Russia’s non-recognition of the borders of Georgia and its treatment of people who live there, whose human rights have been abused. As the Georgian ambassador to the UK recently wrote, after 10 years of Russian aggression, Russia continues its occupation of regions of Georgia, undermining international law and the rules-based system, with massive infringements of human rights.

Another issue is the Smolensk plane crash, which killed the Polish President, Lech Kaczyński, and the Russian refusal to return the wreckage. The Russians claim that the return of the wreckage will simply fuel Polish conspiracy theories. They may be right, but returning the wreckage would also prove beyond doubt what happened in that plane crash, so the Russians should do it.

Ukraine has become the cause célèbre of this debate. A paper produced at the last meeting of the Council of Europe stated that 64 Ukrainians have received politically motivated convictions and are effectively prisoners of war whose human rights have been killed off.

The secretary-general of the Council of Europe said that the continued absence of Russia from the Council affects the rights of ordinary people in Russia to access the European Court of Human Rights. Perhaps that statement can be believed, but I think it is so far from the truth that it is difficult to justify in terms of what can occur. The number of cases involving Russia that have been brought before the European Court of Human Rights is large, but is also worth considering Russia’s total disregard for the ECHR’s judgments, and the claim by the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation that Russia should not be bound by those judgments. We know from the judgment in the Yukos oil company case that following the rules of the ECHR and putting right a case on which it has already opined will be expensive. I am afraid, however, that I regard that as a fair price to pay for the wild west nature of Russia that we helped to create after the fall of communism.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

No one doubts that Russia’s human rights record is egregious, and one can go on listing its faults forever—it has as many faults as countries such as Azerbaijan, which is in the Council of Europe. Surely, however, my hon. Friend is not suggesting that the Foreign Office should stop talking to or engaging with Russia. Similarly, in the Inter-Parliamentary Union, if one engages with the Russians, despite their faults, one might at least have some chance of persuading them or informing them of our point of view.

[John Howell]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point, but we are not simply engaging with Russia as a third party. We are talking about Russia’s inclusion in, or readmission into, the very body of which we are part, and for which we were, in 1949, an inspiration. Those are completely different circumstances to the description that my hon. Friend gives, whereby we should talk continually to Russia. This is about admitting Russia into our family home, as it were, and about it being part of that. In that situation, I think different rules apply.

I was speaking about our role in the fall of communism. We got it right in Poland and in the Czech Republic, but I fully acknowledge my part in getting it wrong in Russia. We await with bated breath the promise to amend the Russian constitution to allow judgments to be implemented.

So what do we do? The first thing that is not going to happen is the lifting of sanctions that we imposed against Russia’s voting rights at the Council of Europe or the restoration of those voting rights. The second thing that I do not believe will happen is the sudden withdrawal of Russia from the Donbass or Crimea.

Can it be right for a member of the Council of Europe to invade another’s territory, to conduct hateful campaigns elsewhere in the region, to have a casual attitude to human rights and to suffer no consequences? Are we simply to roll over and readmit Russia to the Council of Europe without any effects? Is the cost of keeping Russia out of the Council of Europe completely out of kilter with the benefits of bringing it back in? I think the answer to all these questions is no. Is it true that the Council of Europe cannot survive without the presence of Russia? Again, the answer is no.

The Russian Ambassador to the Council of Europe said:

“in seeking to ‘punish’ the delegation of the Russian parliament in 2014-2015 for the free choice by the people of Crimea to become part of Russia, the Assembly restricted the rights of Russian parliamentarians to such an extent that it made it impossible for them to continue their work in PACE.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Russians have chosen to exclude themselves. The ambassador goes on to describe the actions of the Parliamentary Assembly as “thoughtless”, but they were not. Those actions were a deliberate reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which the Council of Europe can hopefully help to reverse.

Depriving the Council of Europe of €33 million is a serious matter, but it should not stand in the way of the wholesale reform for which many of us have argued. It cannot be right to simply sit and plan for nothing to happen at the end of next year—that is not a realistic option, and neither is it realistic for the Council of Europe to have no contingency plan for what will happen if the Russians continue in this way.

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[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.

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[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I fear I will be the grit in this debate, but maybe it will produce a pearl of a speech from the Minister—like him, small, but perfectly formed. I will see what I can do to put an alternative point of view, at least for the sake of debate. I am not one of Lenin’s useful idiots. I have no illusions about President Putin. Like everybody here, I could list all the appalling human rights abuses.

[Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)]

Order. The three Front-Bench spokespeople have indicated that they are prepared to take a little less time, so we should have enough time for people to complete their speeches, although they will still have to be fairly brief.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Thank you, Mr Howarth; I will try to make these points as quickly as I can. As I was saying, nobody doubts Russia’s abuses. We did suspend their voting rights because of Crimea.

Without getting into all the history, I should say that the history of Crimea is complicated and somewhat different from that of Gibraltar. Nobody, as far as I know, in the Council of Europe, the House of Lords or the House of Commons objected when Khrushchev wrested Crimea from Russia in the 1950s and transferred it to Ukraine by decree, against the wishes of the people. I am just now repeating the common view among Russians—it is important that we understand it. No one doubts that the Russian community in Crimea is in the overwhelming majority. Despite all the doubts about the exactness of the referendum, nobody doubts, surely, that the people of Crimea, having been part of Russia for hundreds of years, wish to remain part of Russia. This history is complicated.

Were we right to suspend their voting rights? I do not know. The Russians are a proud people. Russia is not a developed democracy like France or Germany. We cannot expect instant success. As a proud people, it would surely be too much to expect them, having had their voting rights suspended, to say, “Fair enough. We will carry on turning up without voting rights.” None of us would do that here, would we? If we had our voting rights suspended, none of us would agree just to sit around. That is their point of view and we have to understand it.

What of the future? I believe it would be wrong to kick Russia out of the Council of Ministers. As has been said, it is a bicameral system. The delegation and our ambassador talk the whole time. He engages robustly with the Russians. He puts across our point of view. We engage robustly with the Russians through our Foreign Office and the Foreign Secretary.

The Council of Europe is not the European Parliament, nor is it this Parliament; it does not have executive authority. It is primarily, in my view, an inter-parliamentary union. When we admit people to that union, we accept that we have to take them warts and all. We know, for instance, that Azerbaijan has a bad human rights record and, although it has been found to be corrupting the Council of Europe, it is still a member. Surely it is better to engage—to have jaw-jaw not war-war—and at least make some effort to influence them. It would be a dangerous development if those 144 million Russians had no access at all to the European Court of Human Rights. It may be imperfect access, as I have said. The record of the Russian Government in obeying its judgments may not be up to standard, but at least it is some way forward.

I hope that, in those terms, we can view this in a moderate, middle-of-the-road way. We should constantly attack the Russians, stand up to them and condemn all their human rights abuse, but at least engage with them. I would be grateful if the Minister said whether he thinks that our ambassador, in doing all this work in the Committee of Ministers in the Council of Europe, is fulfilling a useful role.

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[The Minister for Europe and the Americas (Sir Alan Duncan)]

Thank you, Mr Howarth, for calling me to speak and for your chairmanship of this debate.

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) for securing this debate, because I genuinely welcome this opportunity to put on the record my appreciation and the Government’s appreciation of his contribution and that of all other hon. Members who are active members of the UK’s delegation to the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, many of whom are here today. As a rapporteur, my hon. Friend has been at the forefront of the Parliamentary Assembly’s work on press freedom, and I know he was particularly active during the last session in highlighting Russia’s failure to honour its human rights obligations, notably in illegally annexed Crimea. I am also grateful for the contributions from all the hon. Members of all parties who have spoken today, in what is a very cross-party and enlightened endeavour in relation to the Council of Europe.

The defence and promotion of human rights is a fundamental part of our foreign policy. That is why the Council of Europe is important, as a pan-European institution working to advance human rights, democracy and the rule of law across the whole of Europe.

Russia has signed up to Council of Europe standards relating to human rights, democracy and the rule of law, but the Russian Government routinely disregard them. The Council of Europe provides a means to hold Russia to account, both in the Committee of Ministers and in the Parliamentary Assembly. I should just put on the record, to clarify matters so that anyone watching our proceedings understands the situation, that Russia continues to play an active role in decision making in the Committee of Ministers—it is properly called the Committee of Ministers and not the Council of Ministers—including on the Council of Europe’s budget, albeit that Russia is not paying towards that budget, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe did not suspend Russia’s rights to participate in debates, just its voting rights, as has been already explained.

I and ministerial colleagues regularly instruct the UK’s permanent representative at the Council of Europe to condemn the Russian abuse of human rights and to do so in the Committee of Ministers, and our permanent representative has worked hard to secure language in Committee decisions that binds Russia to those decisions.

The Committee of Ministers also requires Russia to execute judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, yet Russia continues to have a woeful record, both in front of the Court and in terms of executing the Court’s judgments. Most recently, the Committee of Ministers reaffirmed its stance on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex discrimination—a decision that binds the Russian Government to combat discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Establishing and upholding internationally accepted standards in multilateral organisations is the absolutely fundamental starting point to improving the lives of the repressed and those who are discriminated against in countries where human rights are not routinely respected. Their failure to do so completely undermines the rules-based international order.

Europe’s parliamentarians play a key role in the Council of Europe in upholding European values. In April 2014, in response to the illegal annexation of Crimea, the Parliamentary Assembly decided to restrict the Russian delegation’s participation in the Assembly by suspending their voting rights. Ever since, the Russian delegation has chosen not to participate in the Parliamentary Assembly.

My predecessor at the Foreign Office welcomed that action by the Parliamentary Assembly and the strong stance taken by the UK delegation at the time. I am grateful to UK parliamentarians for their efforts to maintain sanctions on the Russian delegation in the Parliamentary Assembly and for their continued work to shine a spotlight on Russia’s transgressions.

The Russian Federation’s decision in July 2017 to withhold its budget contribution to the Council of Europe was particularly egregious. The figure mentioned earlier today was €33 million, but I am advised that the figure is now higher, because Russia has missed three payments. The amount that Russia now owes is about €54 million. Its absence from the Parliamentary Assembly is entirely self-imposed, and its failure to meet its financial obligations also undermines the rules-based international system.

I have made it clear to Secretary-General Jagland that the UK wants Russia to address the reasons that led to the suspension of its voting rights in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in the first place before its delegation can enjoy all the rights that other delegations enjoy. Regardless of the sanctions applied in the Parliamentary Assembly, Russia must make all outstanding payments, including interest, in line with its obligations. If it does not, it will face further sanctions in the Committee of Ministers in July 2019 under the Council of Europe statute.

The international community has shown increasing resolve in dealing with Russian aggression and belligerence, and to reward Russia’s blackmail tactics in the Council of Europe would undermine that institution and the wider purpose of global foreign policy. Of course, the Council of Europe is not alone when it comes to being subjected to Russian pressure. We have all seen the actions that Russia has taken to undermine countries and other international institutions—institutions that have kept us safe since the end of the second world war. Russia flouts international law—most egregiously in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Georgia. It interferes in other countries, whether that is the botched coup in Montenegro, the repeated cyber-attacks on other states or seeking in a malign way to influence others’ democratic processes.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Those are warm words, which is absolutely fine, but what is the substance? Is it the view of Her Majesty’s Government that Russia should be expelled from the Committee of Ministers in the Council of Europe?

[Sir Alan Duncan]

It is not for me to make a judgment of that sort, and if I might say so, the words I have been uttering have not been—and should not be—particularly warm. We see it as the intention of Russia to exploit instability wherever it sees it. Whenever it sees a problem, instead of trying to solve it—as we would in our foreign policy—it tries to make it worse in order to divide. It seems to be the widespread policy of Russia to try to drive a wedge between the core alliances that protect the UK and our partners.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Will the Minister now reply to my question, please?