Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, on initiating this debate. I know that it is normal to congratulate those who have initiated a debate, but in this case he really has broken important new ground. I very much agree with the thrust of what he said, although I find it hard to distinguish between the work of the OSCE as a whole and the work of the Parliamentary Assembly. I prefer to see them as part and parcel of a wider issue.

I have been on the Parliamentary Assembly since the previous election and I have attended two meetings in Vienna and Belgrade. In the next month or two, there will be another meeting in Vienna. In my discussions with colleagues, there is little awareness of the work of the OSCE. It might almost not exist. The first time I told people that I was off to the OSCE in Vienna or wherever it was, most people asked, “What is that?”. Even Members of this House and the Commons asked that and I had to explain. There is something the matter with an organisation, which involves a lot of good work, effort and money on the part of its member Governments, if its work is so little known and regarded.

At the first meeting in Vienna about a year ago, I was quite astonished. The OSCE local office in Belarus had just been closed by the regime and we were looking forward to hearing the OSCE official who had been in charge of Belarus. He was due to give us a report on the situation prior to his expulsion, but he did not turn up and we were unable to discover why. In terms of his own ability, there was certainly no reason for him not to come to the meeting, but something in the OSCE bureaucracy stopped him.

I very much appreciate a lot of the good work that has been done by the OSCE, to which the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, referred in some detail and which I shall not repeat. The local offices do good work. Clearly, election monitoring is very important and involves a lot of the organisation’s time and energy. The OSCE produces regular bulletins and reports on the situation in many countries about which there are concerns that are invaluable for keeping members of the Parliamentary Assembly informed of what is going on.

I was also appointed to a group of four parliamentarians who looked at the situation in Moldova. We had one visit to Moldova and to the Transdniestrian part of Moldova, which was a useful approach. We are going to continue with that and do some follow-up work. Having said that, I am still aware that one has to explain very hard to people what we are doing and why we are doing it.

In terms of the effectiveness of the organisation, the OSCE operates from three centres—Vienna, Copenhagen and Warsaw—which seems a little excessive for an organisation of that size. I am not totally clear why it has to be done in that way. I have two main criticisms. First, there is a lack of connection between what the OSCE does and the Parliamentary Assembly. Very little of the work of the OSCE and its many facets come before the Parliamentary Assembly, which is the one body that can properly scrutinise what is going on. For the life of me, I cannot understand why we have got into this position. It seems to me that the Parliamentary Assembly really has one main function: to scrutinise, monitor and oversee the work of the OSCE, the local offices, election monitoring and so on. It is very hard to get feedback on that at the Assembly meetings. This disconnect does not seem proper. I very much hope that the Irish presidency will be able to do something about that.

Surely we need proper accountability by the OSCE to the Parliamentary Assembly. I cannot understand how it can work unless there is such accountability. After all, we and the Commons are here in order for the Government to be accountable to Parliament. I cannot see why we have a Parliamentary Assembly that does not have a similar form of accountability. After all, it happens in the European Parliament. Even the Council of Europe seems to have more accountability than there appears to be in the OSCE.

My key point is that every organisation needs to have within itself the ability to assess on an ongoing basis its efficiency and effectiveness. We do not do it as well as we might at Westminster but we certainly do it. I should like to feel that the OSCE had some form of mechanism that did the same thing, otherwise we have no sense that the money is being spent in the best possible way or that the work is being done as efficiently as possible. We should look at the outcomes to see whether our priorities are right. It is a general proposition that organisations should assess their efficiency and effectiveness, but it certainly applies to the OSCE.

I should say that I have enjoyed my attendance at the Parliamentary Assembly and learning about the OSCE. Despite my criticisms, it does a lot of good work. I should like to know more about it. It is an odd comment to make that I have learnt more about the OSCE from the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, than I did in many days of attending Parliamentary Assembly meetings, looking at my e-mails and so on. There is something the matter. Noble Lords might say that that is my fault, but I do not believe that it is. I believe that something is amiss when we have to have a debate such as this to learn about an organisation on whose Parliamentary Assembly I serve.

As I said, I believe that the OSCE does good work. It has the supreme advantage that it includes the United States and Canada, which the Council of Europe does not. We get a broad spectrum of countries that can bring their experience and strength to bear on the many difficult issues in some countries, such as breaches of human rights, problems with elections and so on. I congratulate the OSCE on its good work but I would like to see better scrutiny and more accountability.