Hugh Bayley
Main Page: Hugh Bayley (Labour - York Central)Department Debates - View all Hugh Bayley's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(10 years ago)
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Mr Hague
I can assure my hon. Friend that there is no doubt about that: the commitment of all the 28 members of NATO to article 5 is absolute. This is a treaty obligation, and this is something they all take very seriously, but to show, through our exercises, our deployments and our planning for the future, just how seriously we take it could very much be something to which the NATO summit turns its attention. That is not just up to us; it is up to all our colleagues in NATO, but I think that, in that sense, my hon. Friend makes a very good point.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
I support the UK deployments to the Baltic states and those of other NATO countries. Without wanting to provoke Russia, do the Foreign Secretary and the North Atlantic Council accept that it may well be necessary, in order to give real substance to the article 5 guarantee, to have longer-term deployments of NATO troops in some of those post-Berlin wall accession countries?
Mr Hague
Yes, absolutely it could be, and over the next six weeks there will be further meetings of NATO Defence Ministers and of NATO Foreign Ministers, which I will attend in the run-up to the summit we will host in Wales. We have not felt it necessary to take decisions yet about such longer-term deployments; that will depend on how this crisis develops, but we absolutely do not exclude the possibility of doing exactly as the hon. Gentleman mentions.