Council of Europe

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Thursday 8th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[John Howell]

I thoroughly agree with that, and as my hon. Friend knows I support that in everything I do in the Council of Europe. I try to interest the Lobby journalists here in the Council of Europe, but I probably fail for the very reason that they see “Europe” in the title. I make a plea to any listening now: the Council of Europe is not part of the EU. It looks after human rights, the rule of law and democracy across the wider Europe, and it should be paid attention to.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Howell]

I will, but this will have to be the last time.

[Hannah Bardell]

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman giving me his last intervention. Does he agree that the process of Brexit, the run-up to that and the narrow-minded and negative narrative that has pervaded the UK press have had a profound impact on our societies in how we talk about and view Europe? I agree with much of what he is saying, but I am sure he will recognise that some of that has come from those on his Benches. We need to work together to promote the work of the Council of Europe and to make sure that everyone, from the schoolchildren in our constituencies to civic leaders across the UK, understands the power and importance of its work.

[John Howell]

I agree with that, and I will come on to say a little more on that in a moment.

Many of the current delegation have not been members for long, but while we are there, we will play our full part in working with the Council of Europe to take forward its aims and values and to make sure they are part of the system we all work in. We need to be wary in particular of the activities of the far right, is out to infiltrate our political groups.

The Council of Europe has just completed a summit, only the fourth it has held in its history. Some members of my political party were sceptical about it; I was not. For an organisation that does not put its head above the parapet often enough, it was a great success and it has shown what the Council of Europe is about. It was attended by our Prime Minister, and the declaration was signed by the UK. The declaration commits the UK to upholding the activities of the European Court of Human Rights and the European convention on human rights. It states:

“We reaffirm our deep and abiding commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) as the ultimate guarantors of human rights across our continent, alongside our domestic democratic and judicial systems. We reaffirm our primary obligation under the Convention to secure to everyone within our jurisdiction the rights and freedoms defined in the Convention in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, as well as our unconditional obligation to abide by the final judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in any case to which we are Parties.”

It goes on to state:

“Our European democracies are not established once and for all. We need to strive to uphold them each and every day, continuously, in all parts of our continent. The Council of Europe remains the guiding light that assists us in fostering greater unity among us for the purpose of safeguarding and realising these ideals and principles which are our common heritage. We reaffirm our commitment to developing mutual understanding among the peoples of Europe and reciprocal appreciation of our cultural diversity and heritage.”

As Lord Kirkhope said in the other place, let us ensure that international agreements such as this are honoured.

When the UK last held the presidency of the Council of Europe back in David Cameron’s time as Prime Minister, we initiated what has come to be called the Brighton declaration, which was a reform of the system of how the Court operated. The Brighton declaration wrote the principal of subsidiarity and the importance of domestic courts into the convention. If only people had read that before the recent fuss, it would have made life easier and simpler.

Of the things that the Council of Europe does that I most value, the two most prominent are election observation and monitoring. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe does election observation, but that does not make what the Council of Europe does any less important. I pay tribute to colleagues who put themselves into difficult situations to ensure that elections are free and fair. It is a two-stage approach. The first question is, “Is the environment in which the election takes place free and fair?” In the case of Turkey, I would argue that it was not. The fact that many of the President’s rivals had been arrested suggests that. The second element is, “Is the process used for people to vote free and fair?” In one case, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we found that those elected to open the polling booth turned up with a hold-all full of pre-filled polling cards in favour of the pro-Iranian candidate. They were promptly arrested.

I praise the role of rapporteurs, whose presence in pre-election missions is critical. A good rapporteur who knows the territory well and can get into the detail is a necessary requisite for that. That is not always the case with all rapporteurs. Many have a thin and superficial knowledge of the country they are reporting on.

One of the most potentially useful things I have done as a rapporteur for Turkey is to visit the human rights prisoner, Osman Kavala. He was—I should say is—a prominent businessman and philanthropist. He also has a link to this country, where he was on the faculty of the University of Manchester. When I visited him in a Turkish high-security prison, where he has been imprisoned for more than five years in pre-trial detention, I saw a man who showed no resentment for how he had been treated. I hope that now the elections are over, President Erdoğan will pardon Kavala and release him. He is of course not the only human rights prisoner in Turkey, but he is the epitome of all the others.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

It is a real pleasure to take part in this debate. As I said in my intervention, I commend the work of the delegation. I would like to endorse everything the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) has said about the work of the support team—Nick Wright and his staff—who are fantastic in ensuring that things happen, and that the delegation gets there and takes part in the debates.

Being relatively newly appointed to the Council of Europe—I only came on to the delegation since the last general election—I have to say that most people have no idea what the Council of Europe does. Whenever I mention to people locally that I am going to an event at the Council of Europe, they say, “I thought we’d left all that behind”, and I have to explain that it is actually something different from the EU. It is often just simply not understood. The stuff that comes out of it is often not very much debated here either, so it is good that we have a main Chamber debate on this today. The examples the hon. Member gave about the Venice Commission, the Istanbul convention and other conventions are very important, and I think we need a system in which the Government respond, in the way they are required to respond very publicly to Select Committee reports, to give the same emphasis to issues that come from the Council of Europe, which I think would make it more important.

I want to make a few quick points, Madam Deputy Speaker, but could I first crave your indulgence for one moment? Tomorrow is 9 June, which means that it is 40 years since I was first elected to this House. I just want to put on record my thanks to the long-suffering and very wonderful people of Islington North for electing me all those years ago and for continuing to elect me to Parliament. My dedication is to them, and to serving them to the best of my ability in dealing with the housing, immigration, planning, environmental and other issues that I deal with. I just want to use this opportunity to put that on record and to thank all of them.

The declaration that came out of the Reykjavik summit is obviously extremely important, and it is very much dominated by the situation in Ukraine. Russia leaving the Council of Europe was a huge event, for obvious reasons. I think it was the first time any state has left the Council of Europe. I fully understand why—I fully understand what happened, and I absolutely and totally join everyone else in condemning the invasion of Ukraine by Russia—but we should also be aware that Russia leaving the Council has denied all Russians any access to the European convention on human rights and the relative protections they could try to obtain from it. I also fully acknowledge that there have been huge difficulties in Russians getting justice following decisions made at the European Court of Human Rights or through the convention, but we just have to be aware that it is a Europe-wide convention on human rights, and we want everybody to abide by it and to abide by the decisions of the Court.

All the Council of Europe sessions over the past two years have been very much dominated by Ukraine, and that is absolutely understandable. As I have said—and I repeat it—I totally condemn the Russian invasion and occupation of part of Ukraine. I would hope that at some point in the future the Council of Europe can become an agent that helps to bring that war to an end, because at some point there will have to be negotiations. At some point, there will have to be a peace process and at some point—I hope very soon—those who have been wrongly taken to Russia will be returned and there will be a process of dealing with the victims of war, wherever they are from and whatever they have suffered as a result of it. I believe that the Council of Europe has a role in that and a role in bringing people together, and I hope we can achieve that.

One issue the hon. Member for Henley brought up, and I would like to raise it as well, is the European convention on human rights and the role of the European Court of Human Rights. Page 4 of the declaration states:

“We reaffirm our deep and abiding commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights…as the ultimate guarantors of human rights across our continent, alongside our domestic democratic and judicial systems.”

It was obviously extremely difficult back in the 1940s to draft the European convention on human rights and to establish the Court, because we were dealing with fundamentally different legal systems across all the member states, with very different perceptions of the separation of political and judicial powers. So it is a wonderful achievement that the European Court of Human Rights exists at all.

From its inception, the Court was part of our domestic law, and from the Human Rights Act 1998 its caselaw was absolutely part of our law. Therefore, when an injunction was granted to prevent an individual being removed to Rwanda by the UK Government, I was surprised that so many Members of this House and the Government reacted with horror and anger at the alleged interference of the European Court of Human Rights in domestic law. It is not interference; it is absolutely part of our domestic law. We need to think a bit more deeply about the passage through this House of the migration Bill, which itself does not meet the human rights declaration required of all legislation anyway. If we are in breach of a convention that this country was a party to in 1949 and has been a member of all that time, and we appoint judges to the European Court of Human Rights, we should have more respect for it and understand what it is saying and trying to do.

[Hannah Bardell]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a powerful and important point. Does he agree that it is cynical and desperate of this Government to use their appalling Rwanda policy and a very reasonable judgment by the Court, to which we send judges and have signed up, in order to undermine the authority of that very Court?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I could not agree more. Britain was an early signatory and, indeed, provided many of the people who wrote the declaration and established the Court in the first place.

I also accept that there are problems in the administration of the Court and difficulties in getting cases to it. There are thousands of people across Europe who have different issues that they believe should be dealt with by the Court. I remember doing an advice bureau one Friday evening some years ago, and I counted the number of people in my constituency alone who felt that their injustice deserved the attention of the European Court of Human Rights. I thought, “Well, if we multiply that by 650 in Britain and then multiply that by 23, we get an awful lot of people.” Obviously, it is not that simple. People cannot just go there; they must first go through all their national legal processes. But there is still a substantial backlog and we have had useful meetings with the administration and the chief of the Court to try to understand the process they adopt, the analysis they make of all cases and how they are dealt with.

The Court’s judges are, after all, elected by the members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and we vote on them. The only criticism I would make is that the appointments committee spends a lot of time interviewing the applicants and forms a view on them and issues a declaration, while the rest of us get often substantial biographical details of the individual but it is very hard to understand from that what their legal approach and attitudes actually are, so it can be difficult to decide who is an appropriate candidate. We could be slightly more open about that and perhaps spend a bit more time on the appointments, because it is pretty fundamental appointing a judge for nine years to the European Court of Human Rights, which can have an effect on the lives and liberties of citizens all across Europe. Criticisms of the Court and of any legal decision are normal—we make them all the time—but we must accept that we and our legal system are very much part of that process.

I say that because there are voices, mainly in the Conservative party, that would like us to leave the European convention on human rights entirely and keep calling it interference with domestic law. I want to put it on the record that I strongly think we should remain in the European convention on human rights and understand and respect the law that goes with it.

The fact that the injunction granted was on an immigration issue also demonstrates the importance of immigration issues to the Council of Europe. I am a member of the migration Committee, and we have raised a lot of issues about pushbacks against refugees trying to enter particular countries—pushbacks by Greece, by Turkey and, indeed, by this country in the English channel. It is an uncomfortable truth that there are 70 million people around the world who are refugees seeking a place of safety. Some of them are coming into Europe and some of them are in Europe, and the media and cultural approach towards refugees is appalling in many cases—it is quite shocking.

I have been to Calais and talked to people there. They are desperate and poor and confused, and they are victims: victims of war, of human rights abuses and of environmental disaster. They are seeking a place of safety. One day they will be our neighbours, our doctors and our teachers, and we need a better and different approach to adopting and treating refugees in our society. If it is an uncomfortable wake-up call from the Council of Europe, then so be it; I think that is a good thing.

I am very happy to serve as part of the UK delegation on the Council of Europe, and all Parliaments have politically diverse delegations in order to bring up the many issues that need to be raised there. I am pleased that we are having a debate on this today, but one message that could come out of it is that we want the Government to be more responsive to issues that come of out of the Council of Europe, and that the House should automatically have a main Chamber debate at least once a year to go through the main issues arising from the Council of Europe, as we are doing today. If we want to live in a continent of peace, with protection of the environment and of human rights, this is an opportunity and a place where all those countries can come together at parliamentary level to try to achieve those kinds of changes.

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[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

It is an honour and a privilege to speak as the leader of the SNP delegation to the Council of Europe. Let me first thank the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) for the great work he does in leading the UK delegation. I also thank Nick Wright and the staff in the UK delegation office, who are always on hand when we need help and support. Certainly, when I joined the delegation in 2018, I had a lot to learn about the Council of Europe.

I think this is one of those unique debates in which there is much more agreement than disagreement, and I have to say that what we have heard today from, in particular, my Conservative friends in the delegation genuinely gives me a sense of hope and faith in our democracy. I think that the Council of Europe may be keeping them on the right track, and keeping them honest in some respects—I mean that in the kindest possible way. It is clear to me that all the delegates who are speaking here today, particularly the Conservatives, are absolutely committed to the principles of the human rights and democracy that the Council of Europe holds so dear and champions in everything it does.

Let me say for my own part that, while having been elected as a Member of Parliament for my home town of Livingston is a huge privilege, as a queer lassie from a working-class single-parent family growing up in Livingston, I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams that—having read modern studies and then gained a politics degree—I would walk through the doors of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg as a fully fledged member. Taking up that role was a source of significant pride and honour for me.

I hope that I have played my part in my contribution since 2018, as a member of various committees and, in particular, as a member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights. I have served as the committee’s rapporteur, working on the report “Towards a human rights and public health approach to drug control policies”. The report was produced largely under covid, and preparing it online was more challenging, so I want to put on record my huge thanks to the staff who supported me—particularly Kelly, who carried out so much work and research.

During that period, once we were allowed out and about, I had the privilege of visiting a drug consumption room in Strasbourg. That was an experience that I will never forget. As the debate on drugs policy ranges across the UK, in the UK media and beyond, I must say that seeing the progress that France and other countries have made in providing such facilities was truly incredible. As other Members have said, the opportunity presented by the Council of Europe to see the workings of our European friends and neighbours really does open our eyes and broaden our horizons. I am also now relishing being the rapporteur of a report into the state of human rights, human rights defenders and journalists in Azerbaijan.

I draw attention to the comments from the hon. Member for Henley about the perceptions both in society and, perhaps, even in this place about the Council of Europe and its work. People may not know that the EU nicked the Council of Europe’s flag, and it has also adopted many of its principles. He spoke passionately about the importance of the Reykjavik summit, and I share his gratitude and delight that the UK Prime Minister attended. The work done at the summit on tackling the war in Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia is incredibly important. The SNP does not always feel that the UK Government are doing enough, and significantly more needs to be done—I say that as someone who sat on the Public Bill Committee for the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018, which did not go nearly far enough. We must ensure that concrete steps are put in place so that frozen Kremlin-linked assets can be seized and invested into the proposed Marshall plan, which I know the Dutch Government have taken up. I hope that that will be considered.

Other Members made fantastic contributions. The right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) took a moment to reflect on his 40 years since first being elected. He has been here for as long as I have been alive—I turned 40 last week. I do not mean to make him feel old in any way, but he has worked hard for his constituents, and I congratulate him on 40 years in this place. There has been much talk about immigration, and he spoke about the European Court of Human Rights ruling on the Rwanda case. The hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) spoke passionately about the Council of Europe and its work, and I was genuinely delighted to hear that. I hope that those on his party’s Front Bench will reflect on that ruling, on the work of the Council of Europe and on the principle, as others have highlighted, of our continuing to be members of the Council of Europe.

It would be heartbreaking and unthinkable for the UK to turn its back on the Council of Europe and walk away. As a Member who was there during the dying days of the Brexit process, I remember the outrage and horror of our European colleagues and the pain they felt following the UK’s decision in that vote. Equally, I remember a desire to work with us and to move forward. For my part, and the SNP’s part, when Scotland is an independent nation we will, I have no doubt, be a proud member of the Council of Europe and, I hope, the European Union.

The hon. Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) spoke about how she had been embraced at the Council of Europe as a new mum. That was wonderful to hear and, I hope, gives hope to other Members with children that they will be able to balance their responsibilities. I know it is a daunting task for many, so I congratulate her on that. She spoke about the history of the Council of Europe and its origins in the tragedy of world war two. There was unanimity across the House on Russia’s expulsion, and never has the importance of European nations working together against the war in Russia been more obvious.

The hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) spoke passionately about her work at the Council of Europe on abuse in sport, which she continues to champion. The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) talked about the debates she took part in on gender-based violence. The UK was a little slower than we would have liked to ratify the Istanbul convention, and it was of course my former hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan, Eilidh Whiteford, who brought the ratification Bill to this place off the back of the great work of the Council of Europe. It took a few years to get it ratified, so I hope we will be a little speedier in future at getting important pieces of legislation ratified. I look forward to working with the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster on those important issues.

The hon. Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker) talked about his work on track and trace applications—that must have been an interesting piece of work to do at that particular time—and the beauty of the horizon broadening of the Council of Europe. We must all embrace that.

I am conscious that I have gone over time, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I will once again put on the record my thanks to the hon. Member for Henley for all that he does as the head of our delegation. There will be many things on which we disagree, but we do work well together as a delegation, and I look forward to continuing to work at the Council of Europe with all my colleagues.