Russia and the Council of Europe

Debate between John Howell and Christine Jardine

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[John Howell]

I agree that Georgia is fit for NATO membership. I look forward—along with my right hon. Friend—to monitoring the elections there later in the year. I have no idea what I will find on the ground there, but Assembly members play an important role in monitoring elections in newly emerged democracies.

Many might also recall the motion at the last part-session of the Council of Europe, which took up the case of Ukrainian prisoners of war—as I said in the Parliamentary Assembly, the issue of political prisoners goes right to the heart of what the Council of Europe is about. However, like many resolutions that the Council of Europe has passed to condemn the actions of Russia, that motion will almost certainly be ignored. Indeed, the Council of Europe has passed so many resolutions about occupied Ukrainian territory, the rights of the people there and political prisoners, that Russia’s non-compliance can be seen only as a gesture of ill will towards the Council of Europe.

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

Given that a British citizen has now died as a result of the Novichok incident, does the hon. Gentleman think that we should perhaps reconsider Russia’s position in the Council of Europe?

[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.

Sale of Puppies

Debate between John Howell and Christine Jardine

Monday 21st May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Austin, and a great pleasure to speak in the debate. That might sound like an odd word to use in this context; I do not mean that I take any pleasure in the subject, but we are often called a nation of animal lovers, and anyone who came in and listened to the debate would be in no doubt that that is true. It is an important debate, not least because this issue has created a vast amount of correspondence to my office since I was elected a year ago. That is reflected in the number of constituents from Edinburgh West, 177, who have signed the petition. We can be in no doubt that the public not only care about this subject, but care that we are taking the time to speak about it today, so I thank the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) for doing so.

Sales from legally reared and licensed puppies in this country are an enormous market; the latest figures I have show them in the tens of millions of pounds, which is why the demand for puppies opens a gateway to unscrupulous dealers. Last year, sales from illegal sources of puppies are estimated to have topped £13 million. That is an enormous amount of money, but also an enormous amount of misery, and not just for the animals that are the victims in this—the puppies born with horrible deformities, as we have heard.

Imagine for a moment the small child who is told they are going to get their first pet, the puppy they have nagged their parents for incessantly—believe me, I have been there. They go, they fall in love with that puppy and they take it home, only to discover that it might not survive, and if it does survive, it has been so horribly abused that it may never be sociable or properly house-trained and they may never be able to enjoy it. That child has fallen in love with that puppy and will do anything they can to protect it. While we all agree that we must do something to protect the animals, we must also think about the customers, the children and their parents, who often shell out a lot of cash, and the torment and pain they go through over having purchased a puppy that has been abused.

As the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk said, it can be so different. This weekend, my own puppy celebrated his 13th birthday. He is not a highly bred Labrador or one of the new fashionable breeds; he is a Labrador-collie cross. When we bought him we drove all the way to the borders, to just outside Peebles, where a chap with a farm had decided to breed gun dogs from his gun dog bitch. She was probably not the best behaved gun dog bitch in some senses, since she escaped in the night and, before he knew it, she had a litter of puppies crossed with his shepherd’s border collie.

When we went to see those puppies, the care they had been treated with was obvious. The mother was with her puppies and came out to greet us with the puppies. My daughter, who was then—I do not want to do the arithmetic—about eight, got to play with the puppies, interact with them and see how they behaved. I remember as a child being taken by my parents to get our first dog and doing the same thing. Part of what we must do is to ensure that parents know, before they give in to the pressure or indulge their child in the sort of pleasure they had with a pet, what they should be looking for. Education, as some hon. Members have said, will be vital.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

The hon. Lady has spoken passionately about the consumer, but there is one group that she might have missed out: vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, who take those dogs in for companionship and are so badly let down. Does she agree that that is something we must also tackle?