Jeremy Corbyn
MP for Islington North · Your Party · United Kingdom
“In two minutes, I will do my best, Sir Desmond. I am proud to represent a very small urban area of Britain in which, over the years, we have managed to increase the number of parks and open spaces.”
“I grew up in a country area where we had a competition over who heard the first cuckoo in spring. It is that sort of change in understanding that we have to bring about if we are to win this debate on biodiversity and sustainability on our planet. The Government are pledged to the 30by30 target for the oceans.”
“We have to address the wider issue, which is the pollution emanating from our towns, cities and industries into our rivers and the water companies that do not deal with it. I have 13 seconds left, so I will simply say this: it is great that the House has come back to this issue and that so many Members want to speak today.”
“I congratulate the right hon. Member on becoming Prime Minister and on his stamina at taking questions for already even longer than the longest world cup match. He has said some helpful and useful things about housing, particularly on rough sleeping.”
“Surely the obvious answer is to bring in some kind of ceiling—a rent control of some sort—to the sector, and immediately look at not postponing the rise in the local housing allowance, but to bring real relief to people who are desperately up against it and subsidising their rent out of their benefits.”
“When the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) introduced the debate, he quite rightly drew attention to the huge work done by our constituency and parliamentary staff. It is right that we should thank them on this occasion and also thank all the parliamentary staff for what they do.”
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Every one of 8,612 lines we hold for Jeremy Corbyn, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 19 of 173.
“If we want to look after all the people in our society—I like to think that we all do—that should include all children, irrespective of the size of the family. The third, fourth, fifth or sixth child is completely unaware of where they lie in the pecking order when they are born. They find out later that their presence and that of subsequent siblings reduces income for their family. It does not seem morally right that we should pursue that policy. The question of the benefit cap and its effect on people in our society is massive, as the Chair of the Select Committee pointed out, as did the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) and others. The disproportionate effect on people living in the private rented sector is huge. My constituency is inner-city and has a fairly large number of council and housing association properties in it.”
“The rate of inflation for the poorest 10% of our country is far greater than the 10% or 11% figure that the Bank of England puts forward. Many issues could be raised, and I will raise a few very quickly so that all Members who wish to speak can do so. Some years ago, a two-child benefit cap policy was introduced, which many of us were, and remain, concerned about. Those of us who represent constituencies with a considerable number of large families know that they suffer very badly. The two-child benefit cap obviously has a disproportionate effect on the largest and poorest families in our society. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us where the morality is in saying that the third, fourth or fifth child of a family is less important than the first or second. It is a simple moral question.”
“No, I will carry on with my speech. The 10% benefit rise is obviously better than no rise at all. During the Budget statement, the previous Chancellor would not even answer the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), on whether there would be any increase whatsoever to benefits. A 10% increase is obviously an improvement on what was provided by the last Chancellor, but it does not even meet inflation. It comes nowhere near to meeting the rate of food inflation, which is running at around 15% to 16% per year. Families or individuals who rely on benefits spend a wholly disproportionate amount of their income on food and energy; better-off people spend a much lower proportion on those things.”
“My right hon. Friend is making a strong point. Does he agree that the cap has also been a major driver in forcing working-class communities out of inner-city areas, where there are now huge levels of private landlord speculations going on?”
“If the Israeli Government settlements are illegal, why did the UK Government vote against referring them to the International Court of Justice at the United Nations? What sanctions are being applied to Israel for supplying arms and trading with illegally produced settlement products? If those settlements are completely illegal, as the Government say, why are we having anything to do with them at all? Why did we change our stance at the United Nations?”
“T9. Four million Yemeni people have been forced from their homes, thousands have died and Britain has sold billions of pounds-worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, which have been used to bomb Yemen. When will we stop supplying Saudi Arabia in order to bring about peace in Yemen?”
“The social care sector is dominated by dedicated staff who are paid low wages. High profits are made from it and there is an insufficiency of spaces. Will the money that the Secretary of State has announced go to local authorities? Can it be spent on public provision? Does he not think it is time to recognise that the internal market and privatisation have sucked money out of health and social care—money that could have been spent on patient care and caring for people in the community and in special facilities?”
“The Secretary of State will know from my correspondence with him about buildings in Drayton Park and in other parts of my constituency the deep stress and concern that many leaseholders and tenants have had. They have had to pay increased insurance costs and they have had their lives put on hold, as many other colleagues’ constituents have. I think they deserve compensation for the increased payments they have had to make. They also need to know exactly when this work will begin. They have been waiting years for it. I want to be able to go back to them and say that it is going to start—I would like to give them a date.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and I fully support all that he has said in his speech. Would he agree that the effect of the Government’s attitude, and of this and other anti-democratic legislation, is not only to increase support for strong industrial action to win decent pay rises but to encourage many other people who want to live in decent housing and do not want to live in desperate poverty to support this wave of industrial action and bring about a fairer society?”
“I am proud of my union membership, which is recorded in the register of Members’ interests, and I used to be a full-time union organiser. The Minister claims that the public’s existence and lives are at risk because of the disputes. Does he not appreciate that thousands of nurses and other workers are leaving the national health service, and thousands of teachers are leaving their profession, because of stress, low pay and underfunding? That is what is causing a great deal of stress and problems for the public. Instead of reaching for the statute book and trying to legally constrain trade unions from their legitimate action, why does the Secretary of State not address the fundamental causes: poverty pay, stress, bad conditions and inadequate service in all parts of the UK?”
“If we take the universal service obligation away, we will be left with a lot of pretty incompetent private sector delivery companies, which simply will not be up to the mark.”
“Our service was unfortunately privatised by the coalition Government —thank you, Liberal Democrats, for your contribution to that Government—and separated from the Post Office. That is absolutely the wrong way to do things. We ought to keep the Post Office and Royal Mail as one. We should absolutely retain the universal service obligation, so that every address in the whole country can get a letter or parcel. The hon. Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter) said that the number of letters has reduced. Yes it has, and the number of parcels has increased. The world has changed, but Royal Mail is there, with the universal service obligation, to meet all those changes in our society.”
“I thank the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali) for securing the debate. The current dispute of Royal Mail workers with the Royal Mail Group, led by the CWU, is appalling because of the sacrifices that those workers are making. I have stood with them on many picket lines, in my constituency and other places, and talked to them about the way their jobs have changed and the stress that they are under. They are now threatened with job losses through redundancy, a below-inflation pay rise and a speeding up of the way in which their work is done. The situation is appalling. We need to value our postal workers for being part of our communities and for their dedication.”
“It is up to the Government to intervene now to protect the USO and take Royal Mail back into public ownership, which it should never have left.”
“Can the Secretary of State not just for once acknowledge the stress levels of workers—postal workers, rail workers, health workers and teachers—who have had 10 years of frozen pay and 10 years of reducing living standards and are going through enormous stress at work, with many leaving the teaching and nursing professions as a result of it? Nobody is likely to vote to take strike action unless it is an act of desperation; they do it because they want to get decent pay for themselves, their loved ones and their families. Can he not for once face the issue of the poverty that people face, rather than trying to bring in draconian laws to prevent people from taking effective action to remedy the injustice that they are facing?”
“Royal Mail—a privatised industry thanks to the Liberal Democrats during the coalition Government—is now paying out enormous dividends to its shareholders and an enormous salary to its chief executive, and it is refusing to give the postal workers an offer of at least an inflation-linked pay rise and insisting that any pay rise be attached to job losses, speed-ups at work and yet further pressures on them to undertake that work. I have talked to postal workers all over the country—not just in the past few weeks, but over many years—and they tell me how they once enjoyed the job they were doing and being part of the community, but are now so deeply stressed that they are leaving the service on mental health grounds, because of the pressure under which they have been placed.”
“We must stop threatening them with more privatisation—of the ambulance service and so much else—and with bringing in the military to do the jobs of nurses and ambulance staff during this particular dispute. That is not what the military exists for; it should not be used as a battering ram to deliver those services by a Government who refuse to meet the workers’ representatives. Health workers are not the only people taking strike action. We should think for a moment of postal workers, who have now been taking strike action for several months. They are incredibly hardworking people. Everyone in this House loves their postie and likes to say what a great job their postie does, except when they want to be decently paid. They want to be decently paid for their work and recognised as the important part of the community that they are.”
“I would have thought that the very least the Secretary of State could do before the Christmas break is meet the nursing and health unions and listen to what they have to say, not just about pay, but about their working conditions, the stress they are under and the poverty in which many of them live. We surely cannot be proud of the national health service if we clap for its staff during the covid crisis but ignore the mental health stress that they go through the rest of the time and expect them to continue on what is often very low pay. Some of them even have to access food banks just to survive. Surely, we can do a lot better than that for our national health service workers.”
“This morning, I joined nurses on strike outside Great Ormond Street Hospital. They were out there not because they wished to be but because of their utter desperation about the situation they are in. After seven years of inadequate pay rises, huge workloads and a huge fall in nursing numbers—to the extent that the numbers recruited barely keep up with the numbers leaving—there is a crisis in the national health service. The strike by the Royal College of Nursing is an example of that. The picket was joined by people from hospitals in other parts of the country, including a group from Southampton, who came with their own handwritten slogan that said to the Secretary of State: “Open your fat purses and pay for the nurses”. They were demanding a decent pay rise.”
“That wonderful sense of community that was there through covid is there all the time, and the worst-off and hardest-up are supported and fed by the churches, synagogues, mosques and other places throughout this period. Mr Deputy Speaker, we wish everyone a great Christmas, a great Hanukkah and a great new year. Above all, we wish everyone a peaceful new year in which we recognise that those desperate people who are seeking asylum in this country are not our enemies, but human beings just trying to survive in a cruel world.”
“Because they are unable to access council housing due to the shortage of it, and unable to raise enough money to buy their own place, they end up paying huge rents in the private rented sector, certainly in London and all the other big cities. Can we not have some resolution that, in the new year, we will provide real hope for young people, value their contribution to our society, and not put them under such stress and in such debt? We all represent constituencies, and I am very proud to represent mine. I thank all the public services in my constituency, and all the community centres, food banks and food co-ops, for all that they do.”
“That was done with general approval. After that, we have now had a series of financial statements, all of which redistribute wealth in the wrong direction and all of which make life better for the very wealthiest in our society on the basis of some strange idea of trickle-down economics that will help the poorest in our society, when it does not. We have a decline in working-class living standards, real wage levels and, with that, a loss of service as a whole. That creates enormous stress in our society, no more so than among young people. They are over-tested and overstretched in school, and over-indebted if they have the temerity to go to university.”
“They have to think of why people are taking action, which is that they want to be able to live decently and not rely on food banks to survive. Sadly, in the new year the situation will not get better unless the Government intervene. Our teachers all over the country do an amazing job under enormous stress, with over-stressed, over-tested children, and they are balloting to take strike action. Surely it is time to think carefully about the value of public service and how it is delivered in our society. I will conclude with this, because I do not want to go over my time. In the covid crisis, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, now Prime Minister for a while had a dalliance with Keynesian economics. He paid money into the health service, local government and the furlough scheme to keep industry and so on going.”
“They are taking action with the agreement of their members through a balloting process, and the members have shown they are prepared to make the sacrifice of losing pay to try to persuade the Government, essentially, that they deserve decent pay and that the strings attached to that should not be further job losses in the railway industry. Instead, there should be recognition that the public have invested a great deal in the rail industry, and a great deal of money has been made out of the rail industry by the private sector. The only people not doing well out of it are those who actually work in it, run it safely and give us the service we need and deserve. Again, I hope that the Government will just think for a moment that using the newspapers to attack union leaders only gets them so far.”
“Postal workers are of course not the only group taking action; rail workers are also taking action and have announced new strike days. Before anyone gets up and immediately condemns Mick Lynch, Eddie Dempsey and everyone else in the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, I will say two things. They should stop calling the elected leaders of unions “union bosses”; they are elected leaders, democratically appointed by their members, just like we are all elected to this particular Parliament.”
“My friend is absolutely right. The management of Royal Mail is trying to reduce postal workers to gig workers and put them on a par with other delivery companies that pay far lower wages and have far worse conditions. Surely we should be proud of the fact that we have the universal service obligation Royal Mail that can deliver a letter or package to every single house in the UK. Royal Mail leadership wants to end that monopoly and the universality of the service and thus destroy our postal service. This is the time, surely, for the Government to intervene and not just to speculate on the sidelines and attack Dave Ward and all the other leaders of the Communication Workers Union. The Government should recognise that they are speaking up democratically on behalf of their members who want to deliver that service to us all.”
“The Home Secretary says that Britain has a proud tradition of supporting asylum seekers. That is true in part, but it is not true under her tenure. She is pursuing a vile policy, which is brutal towards the individuals concerned, and continually tells us that it is illegal to seek asylum. It is not; it is clearly there in all international conventions. Will she for once have a sense of humanity towards people who are desperate and victims of wars, environmental change and human rights abuse—and exploited to boot? Cannot she just hold out a hand of friendship and understanding towards these desperate people, rather than the brutal assertion that she is making?”
“Condemning is easy, but holding out the hand of humanity and friendship to very desperate people is what we should be doing today.”
“Like all Members, I hold out sympathy to those who died last night and thank those who risked everything to try to save life at sea; they should be thanked for that. It is obviously correct to condemn people traffickers and all that goes with them. However, there is a reason that people make these dangerous journeys: they are absolutely desperate—they would not do it otherwise. Instead of the ritual condemnation of people traffickers, could we have something more positive about what we are going to do to support those desperate human beings, of whom the Prime Minister acknowledged there are more around the world than ever before, and make a positive contribution to dealing with the causes of flight in the first place—war, environmental disaster, human rights abuses and so much else?”
“The hon. Member must also be aware that it seems to have been a consistent Foreign Office policy for about 10 years now to reduce the number of human rights advisers in our embassies around the world.”
“Everyone accepts there are inefficiencies within that legal system—I am sure there is no part of the British legal system that has any inefficiency in it whatever. The important point is that we are adherents to the European Court and the European convention on human rights.”
“The Government have constantly objected to the European Court of Human Rights—its administration and its judgments—and got very excited about an interim judgment that prevented an unnamed asylum seeker being removed to Rwanda, where he had never sought to go, anyway. That was then used to start a huge campaign about why we should withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights and the European convention on human rights. As the hon. Member for Rhondda correctly pointed out, if we withdraw from those, we then withdraw from the Council of Europe because there is no basis for being in it. The function of the Council of Europe relates fundamentally to human rights. It monitors the election of judges to the court.”
“It is simply unacceptable that a Government who claim to fully adhere to all UN human rights protocols cannot do a report on our own activities and views on issues facing different countries around the world—things that are extremely important. We have to put this debate within the framework of the human rights law that we have. We put into law the Human Rights Act 1998, which then put into UK case law the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as the European convention on human rights, which was already recognised and, as the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) pointed out, was written by UK barristers and judges in 1948.”
“I congratulate the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) on securing today’s debate and on the speech that she made earlier and her remarks about the parliamentary human rights group, which I have been a member of since I was first elected. It is a genuinely independent human rights group and has done a fantastic amount of work over the years. Long may it continue. It is wonderful to have a debate here in Westminster Hall on a Thursday afternoon, but why is the debate not on the Floor of the House? Why is it not in Government time? Why is there not a Foreign Office report on human rights, as there was every year from 2003 onwards?”
“We need to educate our young people not to see the Human Rights Act as a problem or something to make a light-hearted joke about on the radio or television or in newspaper attacks—“Somebody’s abusing the Human Rights Act”. It is there only because of the bravery of human rights defenders in this country and around the world. If we walk away from the European convention and human rights legislation, we will leave a terrible legacy for future generations. The hon. Member for Rhondda is right when he says that there has been a pushback against human rights around the world. Let us not be part of it; let us go in the opposite direction by defending and extending human rights. The next generation will thank us for that and benefit from it.”
“Surely at the centre of all this is a failure to recognise the rights of people to their own self-determination and self-expression. The Kurdish people demand and deserve those rights. It is not good enough for us all just to go to Nowruz celebrations in March. We have to act all year round to ensure the Kurdish people get their place of safety. Rights are universal. Rights of workers are universal. The International Labour Organisation confirms that. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us that Britain is no longer going ahead with legislation that will be inimical to the International Labour Organisation and the various pieces of human rights legislation we have around the world that we should abide by. Workers’ rights are human rights, just as much as anybody else’s.”
“The case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who is still in prison in Egypt, was taken up during COP27. COP27 is over, the greenwashing is finished, they have all left town and people have stopped talking about his case. He has family in this country. He deserves to be freed, and we should support his release. I have a very multicultural constituency, which I am very proud to represent in Parliament. It includes many people who come from all parts of Kurdistan—from Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. The conditions facing Kurdish people in northern Syria are appalling, and the bombing that is now taking place against the Kurdistan Democratic party forces in Iran and Iraq and the problems that are going on in Turkey have to be recognised.”
“They can be journalists just as much as human rights defenders from voluntary human rights organisations. We should be doing all we can to speak up for them. The issues abound in many other countries that I could refer to today. Briefly, I obviously concur with the remarks made about the women of Iran and their bravery in demanding human rights themselves, and there are others who want to see human rights throughout Iran. The British Government are also supporting people such as Mehran Raoof, who is a workers’ rights representative. We have to keep on demanding their release. Nazanin’s release was excellent news, but she was sadly one of a number. Human rights have to be universal. They do not mean going to war with somebody. They do mean engagement to try to achieve better human rights.”
“It is creating a culture of respect for human rights and empowering the Ministry of the Interior to investigate historic abuses of human rights, including the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students some years ago. There was news today that the Al Jazeera broadcasting channel is referring the case of the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh to the International Criminal Court. I wish the channel well in doing that. Shireen was shot in cold blood for no other reason than that she was filming Israeli soldiers oppressing Palestinian people. She is one of many journalists who have been injured or shot not only in the conflict in Palestine but in many other places around the world. We should recognise that there are all sorts of human rights defenders and they come in all shades.”
“After a lot of action by good people in Mexico, including the British embassy and others, who did a great deal to support the family, the case was brought to court yesterday and the mayor was found guilty in the case of the disappearance of Claudia. The sentencing has not yet happened—we await that next week—but it is significant that in this one case of somebody’s disappearance under duress pressure, the perpetrator has been found guilty. That will give some hope to the families of the many, many others who disappeared in Mexico, of which there are at least 100,000 in recent years. While one obviously condemns the disappearances and the abuse of human rights, one should pay tribute to the Government of President López Obrador for taking on these cases.”
“Sometimes, however, one gets good news in a difficult situation, and yesterday there was a very interesting judgment in a court in Oaxaca, Mexico. I have been quite involved in supporting the case. A young woman called Claudia Uruchurtu was arrested while she took part in a demonstration in Oaxaca against the corruption of the mayor of her town. The mayor of the town of Nochixtlán was deemed to be corrupt, and she was part of the opposition to what the mayor was doing. At the end of the demonstration, she disappeared. Her body has never been found. She has never been located. Her family, who live in the UK, were obviously desperately worried about her.”
“It is going to be very difficult, because there is an awful lot of opposition to what they are achieving from very powerful vested interests, and we have to wish them well in that process. I hope that in this debate and future debates we look to our own culpability in all this. I have mentioned the wars, but we also need to think about the huge volume of arms sales that we are promoting and the way in which our embassies around the world have been turned into commercial operations for British companies in order to improve British exports. I can understand the need for that, but not at the expense of taking away the human rights advisers or, indeed, of no longer continuing the former policy, both within the EU and nationally, of having a human rights agenda in our overseas trade arrangements.”
“It is occasioned by huge quantities of often small arms and lighter arms being sold to fuel those conflicts, and they are often funded by mineral interests and those who seek to gain land or power. We have to look very seriously at those issues. My friend the hon. Member for Rhondda mentioned the situation in Colombia. I was in Colombia for the first round of the presidential election—I had been there before—and I talked to a lot of human rights groups, farmers groups, trade unions and academic groups. I did a seminar at the Catholic University while I was there. To the credit of President Petro, his new Government and Vice President Francia Márquez, they have started peace talks with the other guerrilla groups. They are trying to bring about a total peace accord, and they are proposing substantial land reform legislation.”
“Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and others referred, is largely occasioned by huge supplies of American and British weaponry to Saudi Arabia, which uses them to oppress the people of Yemen. Then we have the occupations, which are always wrong in any context. They include the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the colonialisation of the West Bank through the settlement policy. Again, that leads people seeking safety to go somewhere else. The consequences of our inaction, or positive action in supplying arms to the aggressor in many cases, often lead to the problems that we are now concerned with and complaining about. Africa is often not mentioned in many debates, yet the reality of war in the Congo and other places is that it leads to huge displacements of people.”
“Millions of people have sought refuge, and there has been a terrible loss of life, both of people in Ukraine and of conscripted Russian soldiers. Russian peace activists have also been arrested. Hopefully, there will be some kind of process to bring about a cessation of the fighting and a long-term solution to the issues that have led to the war in Ukraine. There are so many other wars that I would go on for far too long if I tried to mention all of them. I have already referred to Afghanistan, but the situation in Iraq is far from perfect. I still meet people who have sought asylum from Iraq, and I meet people from Libya who have sought asylum from that country. What is the connection between those three countries? All have had UK military involvement in their conflicts. The war in Yemen, to which the hon.”
“On International Human Rights Day, of all days, can we not have a sense of humanity in our approach towards these people and the desperate situation in which they are forced to live at the present time? Pushbacks, which I believe to be not just illegal but immoral, are practised in a number of countries, and the argument often put forward, particularly by Conservative politicians, is that we should have almost a military response to people trying to cross the English channel. These are desperate people trying to get to a place of safety. We should bring them to a place of safety and look after them after that—let them contribute to our society. The cause of people seeking asylum has to be examined, because we cannot look at human rights in the abstract. The reality is that it is driven by war and the appalling invasion of Ukraine.”
“Strengthen bilateral and multilateral cooperation in search efforts, including humanitarian rescue activities if migrants are in distress…Establish clear pathways to be followed in searching and identifying persons missing in the context of migration…Respond to the various needs of families and ensure institutional and legal frameworks that allow for an individual specific assessment and response.” Those policy recommendations were important because the number of missing people around the world is increasing very fast. I was astonished to hear that far fewer than 20% of those who die in the Mediterranean or other seas around Europe are ever identified. That is life for some people. They live in poverty, under oppression, seek asylum somewhere else and die, unnamed in an ocean, while trying to get to a place of safety.”
“Whatever one’s views on the Afghan war, we have responsibilities to those people and the poverty in which they have been left. We also had a very interesting report from the International Committee of the Red Cross on the question of asylum seekers. It put forward six policy recommendations, which I will refer to quickly because I am conscious that colleagues wish to speak. They are: “National authorities and regional bodies should: Acknowledge the tragedy of missing migrants and address the problems their families face as a result of this situation. Put in place preventive measures such as ensuring that the respective legal frameworks are compatible with international law and adequately address the main humanitarian problems. Integrate the missing migrant issue into continental, regional and national policy and cooperation frameworks.”
“There were two significant reports, one of which was about the situation facing refugees from Afghanistan. It looked at problems with Afghan refugees settling around Europe, the poverty in which they are living, the numbers now being pushed back from trying to enter Greece or other European countries—I will come to that in a moment— and the desperate poverty of people in Afghanistan. There have been 21 years of war in Afghanistan. Billions of pounds and dollars have been spent on that particular war. We have left behind the chaos of a lack of human rights and respect for people, along with desperate poverty and hunger. I know it is not central to this debate, but we can do a lot better by the people of Afghanistan than ignoring the situation.”
“Who are we to lecture anybody, anywhere around the world, on abuses of human rights if we have walked away from the very conventions that we are supposed to be adhering to in the first place? The arguments used to oppose the interim judgment made by the European Court of Human Rights was that the asylum seekers were “illegal”. Let me be absolutely clear and put it on record that there is no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. The legal right to seek asylum is set out in international law and in UK law, as we should understand and respect. Yesterday, I was at the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons of the Council of Europe. It was a lengthy but fascinating meeting that was very well attended by people from all over the member states of the Council of Europe.”