Council of Europe (UK Chairmanship)

Roger Gale Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lidington]

We take all the independent commission’s advice very seriously, and we look forward to the fruits of its later discussions, but, certainly, strengthening the principle of subsidiarity in the Court’s work is central to the programme of action that we envisage during our chairmanship.

In addition to the issues that I have already covered, we will continue actively to support Secretary-General Jagland’s programme of reform of the Council of Europe as an organisation. He has made good progress, including a reduced and more focused set of programmes, and I spoke to him this week about priorities for the final stages of the reform programme.

In particular, I am pleased to say that the UK has succeeded in persuading the 46 other member states to keep the Council of Europe budget under strict control, with zero real growth for the next two years, subject to strict conditions on wider efficiency reforms and any inflation increase remaining below 2%. We will work with our partners in the Council of Europe to promote an open internet, not only on access and content, but on freedom of expression. That is also a key policy priority, and one of the issues to be addressed at the London conference on cyber-space, which my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary will host on 1 November. Our chairmanship is an ideal opportunity to advance our objectives through international co-operation, and to this end we will seek to ensure that the Council of Europe’s internet governance strategy is adopted.

[Mr Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con)]

If I am fortunate enough to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will return to the internet problem later, because it is serious.

I referred to the Council of Europe’s budget in the Hemicycle, and suggested that it might be cut, but that word is not in the lexicon. Europe does not understand the possibility of cutting a budget. It only ever talks about an increase. Why are we considering an increase?

[Mr Lidington]

Ambitions must sometimes be tempered by the need to obtain the necessary consensus. In the context of getting 46 other countries to agree, the freeze that I talked about is a pretty good outcome. Further encouragement is that the combination of the freeze in the Council of Europe’s budget and the recalculation of the relative contributions of member states to that budget means that the United Kingdom will pay a smaller proportion in 2012 than we did in 2011. That is a good outcome of our negotiations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Walter]

I think that the hon. Lady is right. She is making the point for me that we must be seen to be fair and even-handed in the way we enforce judgments. That might become even more of a problem.

This issue is already taken account of in the draft of the accession of the EU. I am afraid that the Lisbon treaty is quoted in aid on this matter. If there was a judgment against an institution of the European Union, such as the Commission, the European Court of Justice or the European Central Bank, the 27 EU member states—or 28 as there will be by the time this is implemented, with the accession of Croatia—would be obliged under the Lisbon treaty to vote as a bloc. That brings into question the whole history of fairness and even-handedness in the Committee of Ministers.

The reason given for that is that if there was a judgment against the EU, it would be up to the 27 EU member states to implement that judgment. They therefore have to act as one and as a party. That is fine, but it sounds rather like they will be judge, jury and executioner. We have to question seriously how we will take that matter forward. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to that in his summing up.

The next point may sound rather technical, but it goes back to my right hon. Friend the Chancellor’s comment earlier that we are developing a situation in which there will be European Union mechanisms and institutions such as the European financial stability facility and the European Central Bank that involves not all 27 member states but only the 17 eurozone members, If there was a judgment against one of those entities in the European Court of Human Rights, would we vote as 27 member states or would the 17 vote together? Would the 10 non-eurozone members be let off the obligation in the Lisbon treaty to vote as one? I would again be interested to hear the Minister’s response on that.

[Mr Gale]

It gets a bit worse than that. There is a thing called the transfrontier broadcasting directive, which is a European Union instrument. There is also a thing called the transfrontier broadcasting convention, which is a Council of Europe convention that preceded the directive. The convention needs updating and the Council of Europe was in the process of doing so intelligently and in line with technical developments. The European Commissioner responsible for broadcasting has told the Council of Europe and its 47 members, many of which are not members of the European Union, as my hon. Friend has pointed out, that we cannot discuss the matter. What right does the European Union have to say to the Council of Europe—the greater body—that it can or cannot discuss something?

[Mr Walter]

My hon. Friend makes a very significant point about the sovereignty of member states, whether they be members of the European Union or of the Council of Europe. I believe that the sovereignty of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe should be absolute in the case of a Council of Europe convention.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con)]

I wish to touch briefly on three issues. The first relates to the European convention on human rights, which is the first priority listed on the briefing paper issued by the Government on the UK’s chairmanship of the Council of Europe. Article 5 of the convention sets out the right to freedom. Article 6 sets out the right to a fair trial. A constituent of mine has been held in prison in Malta for more than two years. Another constituent has just faced a highly questionable trial in Lille in France, and he was held for two years before the trial without any right to freedom. Malta and France are both signatories to the convention on human rights.

When I started to look into the background, I wrote to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to request a breakdown of the number of UK citizens who have been held for more than 10 months without trial in countries that are signatories to the convention on human rights and members of the Council of Europe. Initially, those at the FCO said that they did not have a breakdown for all 47 countries and that it would be unreasonable to expect them to do all that work because it would be very expensive. However, not wishing to be unhelpful, they asked me to name the countries I was interested in. I named four: Greece, Spain, France and Malta—the latter two for obvious reasons. It was a freedom of information request and they complied with it.

Malta is holding five UK citizens who have been in prison for more than 10 months without trial, and Malta is a signatory to the convention on human rights. France is holding 12 UK citizens who have been in prison for more than 10 months without trial, and France is a signatory to the convention on human rights. Indeed, my constituent was held in France for more than two years. Spain is holding 43 UK citizens who have been in prison for more than 10 months without trial, and Spain is a signatory to the convention on human rights. Article 5, which sets out the right to freedom, is being breached by these countries. The FCO said that it could not specify the number of UK citizens being held in Greece because that number was so small that doing so could identify the person concerned. I did not quite understand that, but the fact of the matter is that Greece is also clearly in breach of article 5.

In the case of the constituent who was tried in Lille last week, I maintain that article 6 has been breached because I do not believe that he has had a fair trial. In fact, I am afraid that his situation was probably worsened by the intervention of a British Member of Parliament seeking to bring about the trial. The man has been sentenced to five years in prison, fined €10,000 and asked to repay something akin to the debt of Greece—€5 million. He does not have that because he has lost his home and his family; he has lost the lot.

During the UK’s chairmanship of the Council of Europe, I want the Government to hold to the fire the feet of each and every country that is a member of the Council and is holding UK citizens, or any other citizens for that matter, for long periods of time without trial. It is a clear breach of the convention. Many of those countries, France in particular, are preaching to the United Kingdom and trying to tell us that we must give prisoners voting rights. We had that debate in this Chamber and reached a sovereign decision as a sovereign Parliament. I explained that in person to the Human Rights Commissioner, Thomas Hammarberg, the last time we were in Strasbourg. I said, “Tom, you must understand that this is a sovereign Parliament. This is not a Government decision, but a decision taken in the House of Commons by elected Members. We have decided that we do not believe that we have a duty to give convicted prisoners voting rights.” While that is an issue, we are told that other countries can hold citizens without trial for very long periods in breach of the convention.

I would like my right hon. Friend to take to the chairmanship and to Ministers this clear issue and say that we will not budge one inch until every country holding any citizen for an indeterminate period without trial has complied properly with the convention.

[Michael Connarty]

I just want to get the hon. Member to clarify and put on the record the fact that all of these countries have not only signed, but ratified and implemented the convention, because there are many countries who sign conventions, never ratify them and never, therefore, implement them.

[Mr Gale]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is absolutely right. The implication is that because we have signed the convention, we are implementing it. My understanding is that Malta, Spain and France have implemented it, but I am open to challenge on Greece— I ought to know but do not. France certainly makes a big issue of the situation and is very communautaire, just as long as it wants to be, but on this issue it is in clear breach and needs to be told that it is.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend regret as I do the fact that, notwithstanding the Forfeiture Act 1870, which established the will of this House in respect of prisoner votes, and the emphatic vote in February, which made clear to Ministers and to the Court itself the settled view of the House, there has been only a suspension of the Court’s judgment on the UK situation with respect to Greens and M.T., as a result of an Italian case, and that the Court has not accepted the will of this House to decide that we are correct and will not give the franchise to convicted felons?

[Mr Gale]

I have already made my view abundantly plain: I regret the situation very much indeed. If there is any case to be made, it can only be this: a person on remand might be considered to have the right to vote, because they have not been convicted. I cannot have my cake and eat it, because, if I want people to have a fair trial and to be tried in a timely fashion, I have to concede that if people have not been convicted, they should arguably have the right to vote—but that is all.

Internet governance and freedom of expression on the internet, is one of the Government’s priorities during our chairmanship, but I urge caution upon my right hon. Friend the Minister. The culture committee, on which I sit as an alternate, and the sub-committee that has been dealing with the issue, on which I sit as a full member, have recently been considering a report prepared by another delegate to the Council of Europe. Fortunately, members of the United Kingdom delegation stood shoulder to shoulder and had the report withdrawn.

The report has now been rewritten and will be brought back before the committee in Paris on 6 December, when I suspect a reasonable compromise will be reached and it will then be debated. When it is debated and passed, it will be passed to Ministers for consideration, but in that report there is a great deal of motherhood and apple pie. The Government’s position paper says that they stand by the right to freedom of expression on the internet, and that is all nice and fine, but we are talking about what is known as public control, which basically means state control—and means something slightly different in French.

I do not want to see state control of the internet, and we all know what we mean when we say freedom of expression on the internet, but we have to consider the fact that, although social networking and all those things were held up as the great saviour, the prop that held up the Arab spring and made things happen, which was wonderful, precisely the same social networking was used in London in August to orchestrate criminal riots.

So, just before we go too far down that road, I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to ask his colleagues on the Committee of Ministers to take a long, hard, proper look at the issue, and to ensure that we understand exactly what we are saying when we plead freedom of expression on the internet. One man’s freedom of expression may be the ball and chain around another man’s leg.

Finally, I shall touch again on the issue that I raised earlier, transfrontier broadcasting, because it is serious. Twenty-five years ago the Council of Europe passed a transfrontier broadcasting convention. I know, because I am a re-tread, and 25 years ago—God help me—I was on the Council of Europe and I participated in the debate at the time. The reason we worked so hard on the issue was that we wanted to make sure that Europe did not do something very silly by insisting that every television station throughout Europe had a half-hour quota of clog-dancing in Lederhosen or whatever, but instead had something sensible. We knew what we wanted. We wanted reasonable control of matters such as broadcast pornography, taste, decency and so on. We created something that was worth while.

Tim Renton, who was then a Home Office Minister with responsibility for broadcasting—it used to be a Home Office responsibility—turned that convention into the European Union directive, so it was a worthwhile exercise. We have now reached the point where the convention is out of date, and because of the advance of technology it needs to be streamlined. The Council of Europe is getting to grips with it, and rightly doing what it was trying to do before—to get it right. Suddenly, along comes a European Union Commissioner who says that it is a European Union competence and that the Council may not discuss it.

As things stand, the Council of Europe has stopped its work on the project. That is outrageous because, as has been said, the European Union represents only a proportion of the countries that are member states of the Council of Europe. I believe that the greater should embrace the lesser, not the other way round, and that the matter is a Council of Europe responsibility. I urge my right hon. Friend to take that message on board very clearly indeed. It is an important issue.