European Union (Approvals) Bill

Debate between Michael Connarty and David Nuttall

Monday 11th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Michael Connarty]

I take the point. It is well made by the hon. Gentleman, who speaks from the dual perspective of looking in from the European Union at the effect on other countries, and looking out now from this Parliament at what the European Union is doing.

I find it remarkable that every time the European Union grows, we have a convention that the new member state gets a new Commissioner. At my first meeting in Brussels, I believe I raised the matter with UKRep—why did we need a new Commissioner every time we added a country? Why does every member state have to have an office of some kind because it does not have an office of some other kind? We did it. We were fighting over the universal patent recently, and the most important thing to the UK was where the patent court would be based. It had to be based in London. It was not about whether the patent was a good or a bad thing. There is a problem with the EU in that it sprays benefits around. I believe it has put some institution on Crete—a wonderful island where I have holidayed often, but I could not work out why a major institution of the European Union had been located on Crete, apart from the fact that the Greeks wanted to have their turn.

That has to be looked at fundamentally, but the principle is correct. If the European Union sets up the agency, it will monitor what is happening with human rights, and I hope it will then begin to ask how it can help the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights and those who want, as Churchill and many others did after the last war, to base Europe on human rights. The questions will continue about the corpus juris, which the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) will no doubt talk about, and the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) will no doubt talk about economic interference.

After all that is discussed, I hope we will all be able to agree that if the EU supports the Council of Europe and does the business, making human rights available to all the people in the EU and then beyond, it will advance Europe in accordance with the original principles of the people who set up the convention, which should be at the heart of our politics.

[Mr Nuttall]

That was an interesting contribution from the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), but one with which I fundamentally disagree. It was obvious from the early part of his comments that they reinforced the points that have been made throughout this debate. In essence, we have jumped back from fundamental rights to human rights.

In an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), I asked whether we could try to agree on the difference between human rights and fundamental rights, but everyone seems to have jumped back to accepting that fundamental rights is just another phrase for human rights, and that the agency does no more than replicate what is done elsewhere in the European Union by the Council of Europe. What came out of those comments was the fact that if reform is needed, we need to reform the Court, so that it can enforce the decisions made by the Council of Europe.