Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, once again the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, has done the House a service in raising this Question for Short Debate about the future of the OSCE. We would all like to thank him and my noble friend Lord Dubs for the work that they do on its parliamentary assembly.

As my noble friend Lord Dubs said, many people, including many parliamentarians, have probably never heard of the OSCE and there is always a temptation—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Patten, is going in that direction—to see the organisation as some kind of redundant hangover from the Cold War, an organisation that has outlived its time, a fossilized relic of the past. You can think of all the phrases. On this side of the House we would certainly agree with him that the Government should be asking the OSCE to justify itself. There should be more information in this House and in the other place about the activities of the OSCE and the value that it is creating. However, from listening to the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, my noble friend Lord Dubs and the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, it is clear to me at least that it would be wrong and misguided to rush to the judgment that the OSCE should go. We say that because it is a multilateral organisation—we are committed supporters of multilateralism—working in one of the most difficult and troubled areas of the world. The Deputy Prime Minister does not get many tributes these days, but he deserves a generous tribute for his decision to attend and speak at the OSCE’s summit in Kazakhstan just over a year ago.

We live in a dangerous world where, if anything, the trends are against multilateralism and commitment to multilateral organisations. Emerging powers such as China put much more emphasis on their own sovereignty, not on working together in multilateral organisations. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, referred to the trends in the United States to focus on the Pacific and, with the necessity for huge defence cuts, pull in its horns in Europe. It seems to us that that means that we should tread warily in dismissing the value of the OSCE, given the work that it does.

It feels like a long time since the collapse of the Soviet Union and since the OSCE’s members signed up to the Paris charter in which they declared their belief in a,

“new era of democracy, peace and unity”.

We know that that lofty ambition has not been fulfilled. Vladimir Putin has redefined democracy in Russia as something he calls “sovereign democracy” and we do not know quite what that means. There has been a war in Georgia between two OSCE members and there are many other troubles throughout the region.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, that we can be critical of the OSCE’s work and say that it is inadequate, but it is doing something to deal with human rights abuses, democratic flaws and the absence of the rule of law in some of the most difficult areas possible. Of course the responses are inadequate. If you have an organisation where 56 participating members have to agree and one of them is the mighty Russia, it is going to be difficult to get things done. However, the role that the OSCE plays in the areas of election monitoring, human rights and media freedom is a valuable one. It is a bit better than a case of “stick with nurse for fear of something worse”. There is a real role for this organisation.

From this side of the House, we would like to know what the Government think about the possibilities of making the OSCE more effective. My noble friend Lord Dubs asked some relevant questions about the relationship between the organisation and the assembly that is supposed to monitor it. He asked what steps have been taken to review its efficiency and effectiveness. The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, asked whether we support it, whether the Government are prepared to back it with resources—I am thinking of staff secondments in particular—and whether we are prepared to use our diplomatic efforts to build alliances within it. For instance, do we work in it within an EU framework as we now do in many international organisations?

The OSCE could be more effective in partnership with the European Union. My noble friend Lady Crawley gave me the latest edition of the magazine that we get from Azerbaijan, which referred to my noble friend Lady Ashton’s visit there quite recently when she talked about the EU working with the OSCE Minsk Group in trying to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. We have leverage over the EU as well as being members of the OSCE. How are we working to try to make those interventions more effective? The EU has real leverage that it can bring to bear in terms of its budgets, its trade access and of course visas.

The work of the OSCE is more relevant in the Balkans where there is enlargement fatigue regarding the EU. If we think that we are not going to be able to get enlargement in the next decade or so, we need to continue to support the OSCE. More than that, we can see within the region that many troubles are likely to flare up in future. We have seen in the recent Duma elections in Russia the need for proper election monitoring. We saw the role that the OSCE played in monitoring the farcical elections in Belarus. If anything, these problems will mount in future; they will not go away. It will therefore be important, from the perspective of noble Lords on this side of the House, to feel that the Government are taking this seriously and have a strategy for making the OSCE as effective as possible.