Council of Europe: House of Lords Members’ Contribution

Lord Anderson of Swansea Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord has drafted the Question very narrowly indeed. I shall follow him in not confining myself to the narrow part of it. I recall a programme on BBC Wales called “Wales at Westminster”. Every three months or so, every single Welsh MP had the opportunity to sum up the work of his or her colleagues. Woe betide any Member who omitted the name of one of his colleagues at the time. I fear this will be another parade of all the good work that the noble Lords, Lord Balfe, Lord Russell and Lord Blencathra, my noble friend Lady Massey and Lord Foulkes, the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, and others do there. I do not believe that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, wanted us to parade the work of our colleagues or, it is fair to say, make an important contribution from mature experience in the Venice Commission for democracy-building. We all in the assembly have one great advantage: the English language.

In 2008 I had the honour to return to the Council of Europe after a gap of 50 years. I was the FCO adviser to the delegation in the early 1960s. Much has changed in the meantime. The assembly was no longer the consultative assembly but the parliamentary assembly. I hope that name change has some significance. New members from central and eastern Europe had joined, including, of course, Russia, but the core business of the council remained human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

We in the UK have a good record, blemished only slightly in terms of the court by the Hirst case on prisoner voting, where the House of Commons rejected a compromise. Happily, a compromise was at last reached. It is fair to say that the Conservative Government —at least the ERG—flirted with the idea of leaving the Council, partly because of the Abu Qatada case. However, had that taken place, leaving the convention would have meant leaving the Council.

Turning to some of the future challenges, one is the temptation of all parliamentarians to empire-build; another is relations with the European Union. When the Council was formed, Ernest Bevin, as Foreign Secretary, said: “I don’t like it when you open that Pandora’s box. All sorts of Trojan horses will come out of it”; one of his more famous quotes. From the start, the Council has been one of interstate intergovernance, not integration, in the stream which culminated in the European Union. Now, we need co-operation, and I hope that the European Union will join the convention, so far blocked by the European Court of Justice. We need to work together on democracy-building and partner with the European Union across the board on election monitoring and so on.

The other major problem is Russia. I disagree with the noble Lord on this—against the opposition of the UK delegation, but I am not so sure about the UK Government. We voted in June to readmit Russia, giving them the benefit of many doubts, despite their record in Georgia, Crimea, Syria, in interfering in democratic elections and, of course, the poisoning in Salisbury. I suspect that it was Russia’s financial contribution which played a substantial part, but it does harm the credibility of the Council of Europe as a forum for human rights.

My final question for us all is: how do we in the UK maximise our role in Europe, post-Brexit? Clearly, we must seek to use all institutions which bring us closer to Europe. This means NATO, and it also means bilateral relations and relations with cultural institutions such as the Council of Europe. We were there at the start and have played a major role. Surely, now we must examine how we can make our contribution to the Council of Europe more positive. For example, we can make a voluntary contribution to the work, because of the budgetary problems. We can drop, with the Italian ultra-right, the objection mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. I hope that the Government are already examining how best we can take the Council of Europe more seriously and enhance the UK’s role in Europe more generally.