Will Sunak really bury Churchill’s proudest post-war creation?
Last week I attended the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. The parliamentarians from 46 European states, including former Tory ministers, voted to accept Kosovo into membership despite loud objections from Serbia.
The debate was led by Dora Bakoyannis, a former foreign minister of Greece and sister of the current Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a center-right leader who has refused all arrangements with far-right Greek neo-Nazis, unlike some of his confreres further north in Europe.
She produced a thorough report explaining why the citizens of Kosovo should enjoy the protection of the European Convention of Human Rights enforced by the European Court of Human Rights on which a British judge, Lincoln’s Inn Bencher Tim Eicke sits.
It means Kosovars now have the protection of the European Court of Human Rights while at the same time some English Conservatives, including the prime minister, want to remove that protection from British citizens.
Greece is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron taking part and dying in the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule. Twenty-five years ago Tony Blair put together an international coalition of the US and EU to end the brutal Serb colonial occupation of Kosovo.
Under the Serb autocrat Slobodan Milsovic, this had led to a reign of terror involving death squads, ethnic cleansing, brutal murders of whole families by Serb soldiers and, towards the end half, the Kosovar population had to seek refuge outside their country, with many coming to Britain.
The Foreign Office under the then prime minister, John Major, had appeased Milosevic, wringing its hands but refusing to take any real action. Blair was ready to commit to military force and Milosevic, like all bullies, folded and the Serb military were defeated like Byron helped the Greeks drive the Ottomans out of Greece 200 years ago.
Sadly and foolishly Greece has refused to recognize Kosovo as a small, poor democracy that should join Europe just as the small poor, corrupt Greece was supported by Margaret Thatcher to join the then European Community in 1984.
It is to Bakayannis’ honor that she argued for Kosovo to join the Council of Europe and have the protection of the ECHR even as her own brother’s ruling party pandering to petty Greek nationalism supports the Serb (and Kremlin) fiction that Kosovo does not exist.
During World War II Churchill circulated a cabinet minute about a “Council of Europe” that could bring together the warring nations of Europe once Germany had been defeated.
Clement Attlee’s Labour government opposed Churchill and sanctioned any Labour MPs who supported partnership with Europe. When Britain was offered a chance to lead the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950, the Labour government spurned the chance to be a leader in Europe.
James Callaghan, then a young Labour MP, said, after he retired as prime minister in 1979, that he preferred “Empire to Europe” and that little England mentality pervaded Britain’s Labour Party until 1990.
Churchill once back in Downing Street fully supported the creation of the Council of Europe and Tory lawyers drafted the statutes of the ECHR.
At times its rulings concerning Britain have trod on the corns of British prime ministers’ feet. The ECHR stopped the practice of grown men beating small boys in schools. Personal confession. I still bear the scars of the “tawse,” a metal edge leather strap used by Scottish teachers to beat errant pupils, from a brief stay in a primary school near Glasgow before returning to the gentler punishment of being beaten on my bare bottom by Benedictine monks in Ealing.
More importantly Margaret Thatcher accepted the ruling of the ECHR after a case was brought by the Irish government that some practices of harsh interrogation used by British security forces in their handling of IRA terrorism in the 1970s were close to torture and had to end.
Now the ECHR has upheld the complaint by a group of Swiss pensioner women that their quality of life has been worsened by air pollution in Switzerland. Of course, the Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-EU Swiss People’s Party was cross but the rest of the Swiss political class took the ECHR ruling as a nudge to get more serious about CO2 emissions.
A UK court and a London coroner made a similar ruling about the death of a young girl from asthma exacerbated by the polluted air of London without any outrage from British politicians or commentators saying he had no right to so do.
The EU has just passed tough new rules on returning undocumented asylum-seekers. Were it not for Brexit the UK government could be helping forge new EU-wide policy and law to deal with the problem of uncontrolled mass migration.
Compared to other countries in Europe, where people smugglers walk refugees across remote frontier paths and leave them to claim asylum, Britain has far fewer arrivals in small boats across the Strait of Dover.
The UK allows citizens from 111 countries to arrive without visas at Heathrow and other airports. Some of them disappear into the unregulated “black” labor market and become “illegal” delivery drivers, or workers in cafe and restaurant kitchens.
Ultimately, if Rishi Sunak wants an all-out war with the 45 European states signed up to ECHR, he may be forced to withdraw from Churchill’s Treaty and its obligation to obey international rule of law. He would then join Putin’s Russia now outside the ECHR following its invasion of Ukraine.
On the BBC’s “Today” progam, a former Tory home secretary, Suella Braverman, was advocating that course of action. You can almost hear Churchill growling in his grave.
Denis MacShane is a former UK minister for Europe. He also writes on European politics.
