Russian Membership of the Council of Europe

Debate between Mike Hancock and Edward Leigh

Wednesday 11th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hancock]

The simple answer to that is that the Council of Europe needs Russia more than Russia needs the Council of Europe. That is the real issue for the Russian Duma Members and I have read with interest some of the comments they have made in the Russian press since the issue in January; they make interesting reading. Those Duma Members genuinely believe that the threat to suspend Russia is a bluff, because they know that the track record of the Council of Europe on taking forceful action is pretty abysmal and they have a lot of evidence to support that line.

The hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) raised the issue of Latvia. Interestingly, the 300,000 ethnic Russians in Latvia are classed as non-citizens. If the Council of Europe believes in anything to do with human rights, how can it allow that situation to persist? It is ridiculous.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

It is pretty intolerable that a country that is a member of the EU and the Council of Europe is effectively denying citizenship to people, and the right for them to sit in Parliament and all the rest of it, unless they learn Latvian. Imagine if the boot was on the other foot and there were large numbers of people here who could not speak English, or they were Urdu speakers or whatever, and we said, “You can’t stand for Parliament and all that sort of stuff because you have to vote in English.” There is a real problem here. I am not defending the Russian position, but we have to recognise that that is what the Russians think.

[Mr Hancock]

Some people might suggest that we are getting pretty close to that in the UK regarding the ability of people to speak English, but how can people be classed as non-citizens in an EU state—or, more importantly from our point of view, in a member state of the Council of Europe—and nothing is done or said about it, except by those of us who believe passionately that everyone living in a country should be classed as a citizen of that country?

What do we do? We have a debate here. I am not sure whether the suspension of voting rights for the Russians will do much at all. Expelling Russia from the Council of Europe would undoubtedly harm the organisation; it would diminish the Council of Europe’s credibility for being able to speak on behalf of the 700 million people who inhabit the 46 member states in the Council of Europe, so it would be a mistake to do it.

We must continue to work with Russia. It is quite interesting to see who the rapporteurs on Russia have been over the years. In most instances, they have been leaders of the political groups, or senior members of those groups who have taken on that responsibility. None of them has ever recommended anything like the suspension or removal of Russia from the Council of Europe. Why? Because they believed that their efforts brought some reward for the citizens in Russia.

The best message we can send out today is that we do not like what the Russians are doing and that we will do everything we can to achieve a peaceful settlement to the issues of eastern Ukraine, but that situation will not be solved and the people involved will not be saved from further harm by expelling Russia from the Council of Europe. We should take a positive step today to say that we hope to see in January a different attitude from the Russian side and from the Council of Europe side.

More importantly, however, for those Members who are lucky enough to be on the delegation to the Council of Europe after the general election, I suggest that they need to get rid of the two things that undermine the Council of Europe time and again: double standards and the continual striving to find the lowest common denominator, instead of finding the right answer.