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Mr. Rowlands: My hon. Friend referred to a "steady development" since 1971, but I have a vivid memory of trying to get our Commonwealth partners to come out against Idi Amin and failing hopelessly. It has been a more recent development, and that is why it is very welcome.
Mr. Lloyd: My hon. Friend is right. The developments were steady in terms of rhetoric, but almost non-existent in terms of action. Even now, one of the problems that bedevils the Commonwealth is that if we accept that it is necessary to have unanimity of purpose, we will always end up moving at the pace of the slowest. The Commonwealth will therefore not be effective in applying pressure to those who fundamentally breach its levels of
democracy and human rights. We must do better, otherwise the Commonwealth will fail to take the opportunities that are presented to it.
The right hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Sir D. Steel) referred to the situation in Kenya, a country that is moving towards an election that no one can be confident will be free and fair. One must doubt whether the Select Committee's definition of a free and fair election will be applied--namely giving an opportunity to the Kenyan public to easily get rid of one Government and replace it with another. In those terms, the elections will fail the central test of democratic acceptability. It is not acceptable for the Commonwealth monitoring group to return to Kenya--they went there four years ago--and say that the elections are free and fair. The report suggests that the Commonwealth imprimatur of free and fair elections remains a coveted accolade, and it must remain so, but it will be devalued if we accept as legitimate elections that simply are not.
The role of the Commonwealth in election monitoring is one to which hon. Members have paid tribute, and that role must continue and be intensified. But it can be carried out properly only if we are prepared to say on occasion that we will not simply accept that a particular exercise in pseudo-democracy is up to the standards that we expect.
The biggest failure that we have seen, I am afraid to say, occurred this week, when the Commonwealth ministerial action group met the Nigerian Foreign Minister in London. The record of Nigeria since the military coup in 1993 has been outrageous. It is not a matter of a marginal breach of standards. It is an absolute outrage that we have been prepared to deal with this country in such a kid-gloved manner. The president-elect is serving a life sentence for the crime of claiming to be the legitimately elected president of Nigeria. That is outrageous. Even the person who deposed him from power is now serving a life sentence, which goes to show the even-handedness of that brutal regime. A few weeks ago, the wife of the president-elect was murdered. That is a human outrage, but it is also a political crime of the highest magnitude. There is very little belief in Nigeria that that murder was not committed at the behest of the authorities.
The murder--or so-called judicial execution--of Ken Saro Wiwa and his fellow Ogonis last year prompted the Commonwealth to take action. We ought not to have sat back this week and said, "It doesn't matter" because it does. The Nigerian Government are now insisting that when political parties form--even in a country as big as Nigeria--they must have a membership of 1 million people, and they must pass various regional tests. No political party in Britain proportionately would be able to match that test, and the result would be that we would all have to disinvent ourselves.
We also know that the civil rights of the population of Nigeria are honoured in the breach. The Commonwealth ministerial action group stated that both sides--that is the Nigerian Government and the action group--had constructive dialogue that needed to continue. That says something, or it says nothing. On the one hand, the Canadians went home in disgust and imposed their own sanctions, as they could not accept the conclusions suggested by, I am sorry to say, the British Government among others. Sir Sonny Ramphal, the former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, made clear that he was embarrassed by the Commonwealth's inaction on
this occasion, and talked about the need for more serious action and to examine oil sanctions against Nigeria--something for which my party has called for some time. We must examine the case for real sanctions against the Nigerian Government.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Jeremy Hanley):
I am sorry that I do not have long to comment on this important, well-informed and often passionate debate. The Government warmly welcome the report and, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign Secretary stated in his observations, we share its central conclusion--that in an increasingly global political system, the Commonwealth has great present and potential value for all its members. I pay tribute to the members of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Sir D. Howell)--the Chairman of the Committee--and to the officers and officials of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in the United Kingdom and abroad.
I wish to emphasise two points early in my speech. In terms of the history and the size of our contribution and the importance of the Commonwealth links to the UK, it is perhaps understandable that there are those who think that Britain is in charge of the Commonwealth. That is simply not so. It is no longer the British Commonwealth, and we cannot and should not allow it to serve an exclusive British interest. There is no senior member, and we all have an equal place around the table.
As the Commonwealth covers 53 countries and more than a quarter of the world's population, and because at its Heads of Government conference every two years it pronounces on all international issues, it is a uniquely important body. There is, therefore, the danger of overestimating what it can do. But the Commonwealth is not a treaty. It is a voluntary organisation from which some members have chosen to leave and which some countries who are eligible have chosen not to join. It has no military or defence personality, nor does it now have any supranational economic authority.
We must look at the Commonwealth with a sense of realism and proportion, as that is vital. Far from leading us to a conclusion that the Commonwealth does not have a distinctive role, it should help us to identify precisely what the role is. I would like to say a word first for Britain and then for the other Commonwealth members. For Britain, there is great value in being a member of the Commonwealth. It provides a special nature in our bilateral relations with 52 other countries, and this asset is worth preserving and working hard at. Secondly,
Commonwealth links in education, law and economic policy all contribute to making the global international state system more stable and, through that stability, more prosperous.
We should not ignore the argument--as some may choose to do--that as more Commonwealth countries become more prosperous, the common language and a host of other affinities that have grown over hundreds of years can be translated into valuable investment and trade opportunities. Those trade opportunities are not just of benefit to us, but to the reciprocal countries. We must help them--as we do, for instance, through the Commonwealth Development Corporation--to increase their prosperity. To ignore our prosperity ignores prosperity and progress for them.
Britain's central and pivotal role in the Commonwealth gives us a special influence for reform through discussion with 52 other countries and, indeed, they have a special influence over us. As I said earlier, no country has to belong to the Commonwealth. No President or Prime Minister is obliged to attend the two-yearly Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in person. If the Commonwealth is to remain an asset, it must be seen to be valuable by all its members. I believe that by the vast majority it is. In practice, this means that Britain cannot expect to table proposals that accord with British interest and simply see them adopted ipso facto as Commonwealth views. That was clear from the discussions on nuclear testing in the Pacific at the last CHOGM in New Zealand and no doubt it will be the case again, but at the same time, as we have done on global trade issues in the past 10 years and ways of tackling the heavy debt burden of several Commonwealth countries, we can get our point across and have it endorsed. We can use that to advance international negotiations in a way that we favour, but only provided that we show a sensitive concern for the priorities and anxieties of fellow Commonwealth members.
As we have set out in the Government's reply to the Select Committee's report, our record since the new Commonwealth context emerged in 1990 is a creditable one. The Harare declaration, the encouragement of multi-party elections, the promotion of high human rights standards by Governments, a strong stance against military government, and an imaginative programme of Commonwealth help to countries trying to re-establish democratic accountable civilian government are all laudable. The establishment in Auckland last November of the Commonwealth ministerial action group to monitor Commonwealth member Governments' consistency and compliance with the Harare declaration has been a success, although the greater successes are yet to be seen. Britain has been at the forefront, if not the instigator, in most of those developments.
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