Sanctions (EU Exit) (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 4) Regulations 2020

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I should make it clear that I hold office in the TRNC All-Party Group and have been a fairly regular visitor to north Cyprus over a long period. It is always nice to give the Government a pat on the back, but people have grumbled about the length of time before these regulations were debated. I have raised this and I am satisfied with the reply that the Government made the regulations on 7 December, brought them partially into force from 14 December, and fully into force from the end of the transition period on 31 December. They then had 60 sitting days for the regulations to come before both Houses under the affirmative procedure. The Government are fully within their rights in what they are doing. They are not always, but on this occasion they are.

When I look at these regulations I wonder: what are they actually worth? What will they achieve? The noble Lord, Lord Empey, mentioned that it is 30 years since the Libya atrocities. It is 46 years since the breakdown in Cyprus. Indeed, it goes back almost 60 years to the foundation of the state. I am not sure whether this will bring us any further forward. We say that the regulations are to

“discourage … hydrocarbon exploration, production or extraction activities which have not been authorised by the Republic of Cyprus in its territorial sea or in its exclusive economic zone”,

but that is exactly what the dispute is about: the economic zone and whether the Republic of Cyprus, in the eyes of the Government of the TRNC, can allocate drilling rights across what the Northern Cyprus Administration feel is an important part of its area.

In other words, until we get the Cyprus problem sorted out, this will be just a minor sideshow. It is one of many, but the fact is that the previous President, President Akıncı, put in a huge amount of work. If anyone was ever to get a solution, it was him. He was the mayor of Nicosia, or Lefkoşa as the Turkish call it. He was the one politician from the north who had good relations with people in the south. He went a huge amount of the way to get a UN agreement and he failed. The Turks thought that he went too far and effectively campaigned against him in the recent election.

Now we have President Tatar, who has something in common with the UK. Nobody really wanted what he was offering a few years ago: a completely new start in Cyprus. He said that the whole basis of UN negotiations was false and that they would not work. He has now put forward the two-state solution, which has always been on the back boiler in Northern Cyprus. I urge Her Majesty’s Government to take a very close look at it. We cannot carry on as one of the guarantor powers, pretending that we have nothing to do with it and that all we have to do is say, “Naughty north Cyprus, you don’t exist”. I quote a Written Answer that came out only last week:

“The United Kingdom does not recognise the self-declared ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’.”


Hard luck: I am afraid it is there and not doing too badly, actually. It could do much better if we get an agreement, but it is there and it exists.

I want to ask the Minister this: what is the purpose of the sanctions? Will they ever be applied to anyone at all? Can he tell me any individuals or entities they apply to, or that the Government are looking to apply them to? Who at present is, and what sort of people are, being fingered for these sanctions, or will they be a dead letter? The explanatory statement says:

“Sanctions can be used to change behaviour”,


but they have not done very well over the past 46 years. I wonder whether they are changing or reinforcing behaviour, because every time I go to Cyprus I notice a little more hardening of actions and views, a little more intransigence, and a few more people who do not remember a united island and who think that the status quo is quite acceptable if they can negotiate a few more changes at the margin to make it slightly easier to live with.

Will Her Majesty’s Government take a more proactive role than just sitting around, as they have done throughout our membership of the EU, saying, “We hope something turns up. We really want it to, but we don’t know what to do”? I am afraid that is what it has seemed like up to now.