In1 accordance with the Department's minute on the subject of the imprisonment of Archbishop Stepinac, I saw Mr. Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, on the 30 December - after he had been compelled to cancel previous appointments to see me. Though he said he had recovered from his illness, I thought he looked and sounded much fatigued.
I read to him the terms of the Dáil Resolution and made the points contained in the Department's note accompanying it.
Expressing sympathy with our attitude, he emphasised at once the view that the solution would be found in an International Court of Human Rights. He had already a Committee considering that question now. When I asked whether he saw any possibility of such a Court being set up reasonably soon, he said that he would be very disappointed if by the end of 1947 something, if not 100 percent of what the British wanted on this proposal, was not done. From his conversations with Mr. Byrnes, he felt sure that the British would have full American support when the question came up for discussion. He thought that the mere existence of an International Court of Human Rights for questions arising under the Charter, would be a big preventive of cases of oppression in much the same way that the establishment of the British Court of Criminal Appeal had resulted in comparatively few appeals being made to it.
As we knew the Australians had raised the question in Paris but had not handled it very well. Dr. Evatt began the discussion but when he had had to leave for Australia, the remaining Australian Delegates seemed to be rather vague about the character of the proposed Court and their arguments in consequence lacked clarity and force. Some countries proposed that there should be a Court of Human Rights in each country: some asked for a court to Europe, other countries wanted an International Court to be set up with adequate powers under the Central authority of the United Nations Organisation. In the result there was no agreement.
He said that they would have been glad to have seen the Irish Government in the United Nations Organisation. I told him that I thought there was at the present moment no strong feeling on the part of our people for admission to the United Nations Organisation, adding that an experienced observer at the Paris Conference had recently suggested to me that we were well out of the Organisation until the veto was modified. What were the prospects of any such modification?
In future Mr. Bevin said he thought we would find that the veto would not be used anything like so frequently by the Russians as it had been in the past. He thought the true position of the Russians at the Paris and New York conferences was that on quite a number of questions, neither the Delegation nor the people in Moscow knew what to do or say - hence the stone-walling.
Returning from America on the same boat, M. Molotov had told him that he had no idea of the amount of work and difficulty which was involved in the discussion of the various treaties and as much as said that he anticipated that things would go much easier in the future. Mr. Bevin had expressed to his British colleagues his conviction that a good deal of the trouble he had experienced with the Russians was due to sheer ignorance and lack of experience on their part.
The Foreign Secretary then talked on other matters.
In a glow of moral fervour he thanked God that the British had an unwritten Constitution and said he had more than once emphasised to Mr. Byrnes and M. Molotov this great benefit of history. It gave the British freedom to be decent to everyone and enabled them to respect traditions, even where the tradition was no higher than 'the old school tie'!
About India he said that at the moment he could not see any light at the end of the tunnel. The difficulty was not here but in India. (When talking to me recently, Pandit Nehru made use of the same simile - describing the tunnel as being 'very long and very dark' but said the difficulty was not really in India but here because the British were trying to do with them what Lloyd George2 did with us about the Six Counties). Mr. Jinnah,3 formerly of the Hindoo community had been extremely difficult. 'And then', he continued, 'as I keep telling my colleagues in the Cabinet, if you shut up a man like Pandit Nehru in prison for sixteen years, how can you expect him to have a balanced view about anything?' The solution, he felt, would be found but it would be reached only after a long and arduous struggle.
A brief reference to Palestine showed his grave concern at a position which was hourly deteriorating.
Mr. Bevin referred to Mr. Jim Larkin4 saying with evident satisfaction that he was the only Labour Leader in this country who 'had not fallen out with Jim Larkin'.
He told me that M. Bidault5 said 'a good thing' to him - presumably at the Paris Conference. When he congratulated M. Bidault on his Government's proposals for Indo-China, the latter said that the French had learned a lesson from the British. 'What lesson is that?' asked Mr. Bevin, 'Oh', replied M. Bidault, 'like you, we give and we keep'. He told me this as we were walking to the door at the end of the conversation: he was on time and I had, therefore, no opportunity to make from our standpoint the obvious comment on what he had - curiously for him - called 'a good thing'.
