Greenpeace Activists in the Russian Federation Debate
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James Gray
Main Page: James Gray (Conservative - North Wiltshire)Department Debates - View all James Gray's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Greenpeace Activists in the Russian Federation
James Gray Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Chris Bryant
The answer to the question by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) is yes. I hope that the Minister will reply on the issue of how the British Government can work with Russia, because the British Government’s relationship with the Russian Government is not always at its best, and whether it might be possible to work with other countries and some other agents, such as Shell and BP, to ensure a successful outcome. In my view, a successful outcome means that all the activists are out of Murmansk, out of the Russian Federation and home before Christmas, preferably in the next couple of weeks.
Mr Gray
I will speak fast, so I will be extremely brief. I agree with the points that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) made a moment ago. She and I attended the Arctic conference. The point she made was not so much about the consular issues, which the hon. Gentleman is perfectly correct to raise—I strongly agree with every word he has said so far—but that we must find a way for the future of bringing the two sides together in a way that does not involve raiding oil rigs and taking action. It should involve talking and sitting down to discuss the issues among ourselves.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I congratulate the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) on securing the debate. He was, to some extent, tactful in what he said about Russia, and he did not mention some of the other significant human rights cases, such as those of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev and the late Sergei Magnitsky, and the disproportionate treatment meted out to members of Pussy Riot. I understand his reasons for being tactful, but there is an issue for Russia to take notice of: its reputation for human rights abuses, and the damage being done in that regard, is significant and cumulative. It is doing more and more damage to its international reputation through disproportionate responses to events such as those that we are discussing.
Russia’s response is disproportionate, as the hon. Gentleman also, less tactfully, said. There is a level of irritation that comes with politics; he conceded that he is sometimes irritating to me. His ability to remind everyone that we went to school together is one of his more irritating habits, although I suspect that the fact that he went to Cheltenham college does him more political damage in Rhondda than it does me in Cheltenham.
We in this Parliament have been subject to Greenpeace actions. Members of Greenpeace were on our roof in 2009, unfurling banners about climate change. They climbed Big Ben—or the clock tower, in deference to the hon. Gentleman’s reputation for pedantry—in 2004.