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Council of Europe (UK Chairmanship)

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 Fortunately, members of the United Kingdom delegation stood shoulder to shoulder and had the report withdrawn.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 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.