Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy

Pat Glass Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 General Committees

[The Chair]

We now have until 5.36 pm for questions to the Minister. I remind Members that questions should be brief. It is open to a Member, subject to the discretion of the Chair, to ask related supplementary questions.

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

As this is my first outing in one of the European Committees, Mr Rosindell, I hope that the Minister will handle me gently.

I understand that the action plan is about third countries and not our internal EU partners. None of us would have any problems in principle with the action plan, which the Minister described as a document of principles, high-level actions and practical steps. That is where I had a problem when reading through the document, because I think that I got more about what the practical steps are and what is going on from the Minister in a 10-minute speech than I did from two hours of reading that document. When I look at an action plan, I expect high-level actions, milestones, timescales, costs and some numbers detailing how many and by when. I did not see any such reference in this document. When I was a director of education, I had three banned words from action plans—ongoing, developing and progressing, because they mean nothing. In terms of timescales, 75% to 80% of the document before the Committee is ongoing. I had a problem with that.

The Minister referred to the Court of Auditors, so I am assuming that underneath this high-level document are other documents that will tell me exactly how many, by when, who is responsible and the costs, as well as where we are, where we want to get to and how we will get there. I think fellow Committee members were also looking for those answers. Is there a series of documents beneath this high-level document that will give me those specific, practical answers?

We are working with two different drafts, and my first question relates to objective no. 4 of the table in my version of the new action plan. I appreciate that it relates to third parties and not to our EU partners, but it does feel a little like, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Objective 4.b refers to the need to

“Monitor at bilateral and multilateral level the compliance by partner countries of their international obligations in terms of access to justice and fair trial, including legal aid”.

How does that sit with our Government’s recent action to cut back access to justice and legal aid?

My second question is about item no. 12, “Cultivating an environment of non-discrimination.” Objective 12.a is to:

“Develop an ‘EU Handbook on Anti-discrimination’ in third countries, outlining tools for anti-discrimination measures”.

Well, that is going to do it for the Ugandan anti-homosexual laws—that is going to make it happen. I was expecting something more than just a handbook. Who is going to do this? The EEAS, the Commission and the Council. It is a handbook, so surely they have some idea who is going to put it together.

My last point concerns no. 25, “Counter-terrorism”, which deals with

“how to prevent radicalisation and extremist violence among young people in third countries…in the field.”

I am curious about how that will relate to our Prevent strategy.

Those are my three observations. Overall, I think that the strategy is moving in the right direction, but I have concerns about who will monitor it, how it will be monitored and how we will judge whether it is effective and gives value for money. It will be difficult to judge whether the strategy is successful if we have no idea where we started, where we intend to be or what the milestones are along the way. Presumably, those things are in the low-level documents that the Minister is going to tell me about now.

[Mr Lidington]

I welcome the hon. Member for North West Durham to her new responsibilities. We miss her predecessor, but during her time in the House she has shown herself to be interested in and committed to European issues. I am sure that we will debate European matters across the Committee and across the Chamber on many enjoyable occasions. I will try to answer her questions briefly.

As I said in my opening comments, the plan is deliberately intended as a high-level statement of objectives and principles that should inform the whole range of external policy activity that the EU and its institutions undertake. Other documents, most obviously the annual reports on the EU’s human rights work, are worth looking at. The External Action Service will report on missions to particular countries and it will sometimes report to the European Parliament on the EU’s interaction with a specific third country. In those reports, hon. Members will see human rights issues being raised in accordance with the principles set out in the action plan. There are quite a lot of different documents, such as the EU’s human rights guidelines and a recently adopted EU framework policy on transitional justice, which add up to a more complete picture.

On the question of who will monitor this work, the EU institutions and the representatives of member states in Brussels—the permanent representations—have an important role in trying to ensure best value for money at all times. The European Court of Auditors plays a crucial role in monitoring that, as it does every other aspect of EU expenditure.

When I visited the Court of Auditors late last year, I was told that I was the first British Minister they could remember ever visiting the place, which I thought was rather a pity. What impressed me was that the Court of Auditors had a very clear objective to shift its focus from measuring inputs into particular programmes to looking at outcomes and focusing much more on whether the declared objectives of a particular EU programme have been achieved, rather than on how much money might be going into something and whether it had been spent on this particular line rather than that particular line.

I mentioned in my opening comments the European instrument for democracy and human rights as one of the external funding instruments. Precisely because human rights work is meant to be mainstreamed in everything the EU does in terms of its foreign policy, it is not possible to abstract a dedicated budget for human rights work alone. For example, what the EU does in relation to Saudi Arabia or Iran will include a human rights element, but it will include other things as well. The pre-accession funding programmes that are available to Turkey and to western Balkans countries that are moving towards membership, and some of the partnership funds to some of the eastern European countries from the former Soviet Union, will also have a human rights element as we try to encourage those countries to build functioning democracies and entrench the rule of law and human rights in their political culture.

I turn briefly to the three specific items that the hon. Lady raised. In fairness, even with the recent restrictions on legal aid, the United Kingdom’s legal aid system remains one of the most generous anywhere in Europe or the democratic world. What the EU is trying to focus on here is the fact that there are too many countries in which it is impossible for defendants to have access to an independent lawyer at all, and where everything that we take for granted in terms of such statutes as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 or the rules of procedure in court are simply not available in the way that we would understand them. As part of the consular casework that I have dealt with, I have had British citizens, through their families, complaining that they have sometimes not had any opportunity to understand the charges being brought against them in court. That is the sort of issue that this policy is designed to address.

When it comes to anti-discrimination work, the reality is that such work has to proceed through persuasion, good practice and peer group pressure within international organisations. If, for example, we look at the way in which the United Kingdom Government first drove forward preventing sexual violence from being used as a weapon of war, placed that on the international agenda and then used our membership of the EU and of the UN to get other countries to take this issue up and make it a priority, that demonstrates one particular way in which this approach can work. We certainly see the EU’s action plan as complementing our own bilateral efforts to increase women’s political participation around the world, from the middle east to north Africa to work with indigenous groups in Latin America.

On the question of counter-terrorism, again we see the EU action plan work complementing what we seek to do under Prevent and other United Kingdom programmes. There are many countries around the world that face a genuine threat from terrorism but that also do not observe the standards in terms of human rights and due process that we would expect from our own police and judicial systems, so part of what we do bilaterally and part of what we do through EU activity is to have a dialogue with those countries and discuss how it is possible to combine effective action against terrorism with respect for the rule of law and for human rights. That is an issue that Members from all parties in the House have raised in the context of Colombia in debates in this House. It is an issue that we raise in our dialogue with Russian authorities, who face a genuine terrorist threat in the north Caucasus but who tackle it in a somewhat different way from how we might tackle terrorism here.