Ukraine: Refugees

Baroness Helic Excerpts

Wednesday 6th April 2022 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Helic]

That the Grand Committee takes note of Her Majesty’s Government’s plans to support refugees from Ukraine.

[Baroness Helic (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as per the register. I am pleased to welcome my noble friend Lord Harrington of Watford, who brings with him valuable experience from another place and is taking on important responsibilities at a grave moment. I look forward to his maiden speech and to his work on behalf of refugees, at a time when one in 10 people worldwide is displaced by conflict, persecution or disaster.

This debate is very close to my heart: 30 years ago today, Sarajevo, the capital of the country in which I was born and brought up, was attacked by the Yugoslav and later the Bosnian Serb army. It was besieged for 1,425 days, and 11,541 civilians were killed, of whom 1,601 were children. On an average day, 329 mortar shells fell on the city, which was cut off from electricity, food and water—and from the rest of the world. Almost 100,000 people died across Bosnia-Herzegovina during three and a half years of war. Crimes against humanity and genocide were committed, and over 1 million Bosnians became refugees. I was one of them. I hoped never to see similar scenes in another European country—yet, as we speak, Mariupol is enduring its 42nd day of bombardment and a quarter of the Ukrainian population is displaced, inside Ukraine or as refugees.

No one wants to become a refugee or to leave their home; it is a journey of fear, uncertainty, peril and loss. This country welcomed me and has given me extraordinary opportunities. It is a privilege to stand here today; it is something that I love and am deeply proud of. But I would much rather I were not here, had never been a refugee and had never been forced to leave my country of birth. I would much rather I were teaching English in Bosnia after a life of peace, as I had imagined and hoped, than speaking here, after an experience of war. I know that Ukrainians fleeing today will wish nothing more than to be able to live in safety and stability in Ukraine and for the international community to find ways to stop the aggression that has been unleashed upon them.

In the light of that experience, and of mine, I urge the Government to intensify their efforts in six areas in particular. First, on visas routes for Ukrainians coming to Britain, we should continue to expand our visa schemes so that they are as broad and generous as is possible and safe. All Ukrainians in the United Kingdom should be able to use the family visa route to bring their relatives to this country. All Ukrainians in the United Kingdom should have the same leave to remain, and non-Ukrainians who were permanent residents in Ukraine, and were displaced by the conflict, should also be entitled to refugee status in the United Kingdom.

I welcome my noble friend’s commitment to simplifying and speeding up visa processing. Security checks are absolutely necessary but must be as fast and as easy as possible. Research by the University of Birmingham has shown that the longer women in particular are without access to housing and resources, the more vulnerable they are to sexual and gender-based violence. Speeding up the process is a matter of basic safety.

This leads me to my second point, on trafficking and safeguarding. Some 90% of Ukrainian refugees are women and children. Like all displaced persons, they are at increased risk of trafficking, abuse and exploitation. The best way to combat this is to make sure that safe and secure official routes are open, bureaucratic hurdles are reduced and information on how to access those routes is readily available. We should also look to liaise with our European partners and strengthen our joint efforts to combat trafficking, including by urgently making sure that citizens and agencies are aware of risk signs, not at some point in the future but now. Although the vast majority of Homes for Ukraine hosts are generous and genuine, we need to be vigilant. There are always people who seek to exploit suffering for their own ends. Safeguarding checks on hosts need to be thorough. Perhaps my noble friend could look at accelerating enhanced DBS checks. Councils will need additional funding for checks upfront—they need to happen before refugees arrive.

Refugees will be vulnerable, even once here in the United Kingdom. Unaccompanied minors are a particular concern. I welcome the fact that the Department for Education has done work on this and is offering guidance to councils and schools. Safeguarding should not stop once a refugee has arrived. There should be follow-up checks over the coming months. I look to my noble friend to make sure that the safeguarding and anti-trafficking aspects of our response are not forgotten.

Thirdly, we need to make sure that there is comprehensive and ongoing support for refugees in the UK. A refugee is not only in need of physical safety. Many will be traumatised and vulnerable. We need to ensure that psychosocial support is available, both during the first six months and beyond, as refugees establish new lives here in the United Kingdom. I know from my own experience how difficult it is. I remember coming to Britain and how happy and relieved I was, but at the same time how hard it was to get used to peace. The initial euphoria of safety suddenly became a burden: a feeling of guilt that I was safe, but my friends and family were not. When I think about it today, I wonder how my host family coped, and from where they found their understanding, generosity and patience. It is not an easy undertaking. I hope that my noble friend the Minister can offer a commitment on providing support for refugees in processing their ongoing trauma. Specialist mental health support must be available for children in particular, as well as for survivors and witnesses of sexual violence and other atrocities. Schools, health services and local councils are all likely to need additional resources and assistance for arrivals under both visa schemes. We should not overlook the need to support those coming via the family visa route, either.

We all hope that this war will be over swiftly, but it may not. Just as important as speeding up the process now is making sure that our response can be sustained. What will happen in six months’ time, or a year’s? What support will be in place for refugees then, if needed? How are we going to help them find long-term accommodation? Support services will need funding beyond this year. My noble friend’s other responsibility is Afghan refugees, 8,000 of whom are reportedly still living in hotels. It is almost impossible to build a new life like that. I hope that he can tell us what is being done to provide long-term support for Afghans as well as Ukrainians arriving in the United Kingdom.

Fourthly, we should maintain our support for Ukrainian refugees in Europe. Most of them will want to remain close to Ukraine, where their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers are defending their homes and towns. We should continue to offer additional funding to UN agencies, NGOs and directly to Ukraine’s neighbours, who are supporting the great majority of Ukrainian refugees. We should push for third-country nationals displaced by the conflict to receive the same protection as Ukrainians in Europe. The funding we offer must be additional, not reallocated from elsewhere.

Fifthly, we should learn from these crises and apply the lessons to refugees elsewhere. There were 84 million displaced people worldwide before the invasion of Ukraine, more than 26 million of them refugees. It is natural that we play a bigger role in helping refugees from our neighbourhood than from countries further away, but all refugees have a right to protection and around the world too few are able to access the safety which is theirs by right. There are still refugees stuck on the Poland-Belarus border, exploited by Lukashenko, for sure, but also abandoned by democracies.

In the last year, two major crises have led to new refugee schemes in this country—the two schemes for which my noble friend the Minister is responsible—for refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan. We have also had the BNO visa for British nationals from Hong Kong. I hope that, once Ukrainian refugees are receiving the support they need, my noble friend will reflect on the lessons of these three schemes. We cannot continue to lurch from crisis response to crisis response, improvising schemes which, for all their strengths, have real flaws—the Afghans still in hostels, the Ukrainians going to unprepared hosts and the endless visa process. We need to be better prepared.

I hope we will take the lessons learned from our response to Ukraine and apply them elsewhere. Human Rights Watch and others are calling for an Afghan family reunion scheme, based on the Ukraine family scheme, to allow those who supported our work in Afghanistan to be reunited with their families. Will my noble friend consider that?

If we could put the unity and determination currently on display in the West behind a long-term commitment to resettling serious numbers of refugees in liberal democracies around the world every year, that would be a remarkable achievement and a staunch rebuke of Vladimir Putin’s policies of division and his unconcern for human life.

Sixthly, we should remember that the best thing we can do for refugees in the long term is to prevent so many citizens from having to flee their countries in the first place. Donations are a stop-gap, not an answer. I struggle to think of a conflict in the last decade that we have really succeeded in ending. Fighting goes on in Syria, in Yemen, in Ethiopia, in the Central African Republic, in the Sahel. A fragile UN-brokered ceasefire is holding, just, in Libya, but the situation is still unstable. Our role in Afghanistan has ended in defeat and, of course, war has continued in Ukraine since 2014.

We have to work on solving conflicts rather than providing support around the edges. We must get better at tackling the root causes, not just responding when it is already too late. We should seek to strengthen international institutions where we can and urge our friends and partners to play their part. If those do not work, let us be honest about it. We need to improve our capacity to maintain the rules of war and to prevent war crimes such as sexual violence in conflict—crimes which are both drivers and results of displacement.

The horrific reports emerging from Ukraine are a reminder of how far we have to go and how impunity is still the norm. I hope that the opportunities for accountability in Ukraine may be greater than in most conflicts. Ukrainian prosecutors are active and I welcome the International Criminal Court investigation, the UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry and the OSCE mission of experts. It is crucial that sexual violence in conflict gets due attention as part of these efforts. We can and should support this, offering expertise from our Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative and our team of experts.

I was pleased to see signs at Heathrow recently offering details for those arriving from Ukraine on how to report war crimes to the police. We need to ensure that such notices are widespread, particularly when it comes to sexual violence in conflict, which is almost always underreported. Investigations and accountability take expertise and dedicated resources. Survivors must be supported to give evidence. I firmly believe that establishing a permanent independent international body to investigate sexual violence in conflict in post-conflict situations would be the most effective way to ensure that this terrible crime receives the attention and knowledge it demands, that allegations can be investigated as soon as they arise and that impunity can be broken down, not just in Ukraine but elsewhere.

I will make one final point. We do not know how long this war is going to continue, nor do we know precisely how it will end. I believe, though, that one day there will be peace and that Vladimir Putin will not have won. Ukraine will outlive Putin and will remain a democracy and a free country. Many Ukrainian refugees will want to return to the homes, friends and family members they left behind. Just as they need our support now, they will need our support then. The cities of Ukraine will need to be restored and the economy rebooted. Schools and hospitals will need to be rebuilt. As we discuss how best to help refugees today, let us also remember to look forward to peace and rebuilding. That is the timescale over which we must sustain support for Ukrainian refugees and the goal towards which our efforts should point.

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[Baroness Helic (Con)]

My Lords, I will not take up much time. I just want to thank you all for your kindness towards me, which you have extended on many occasions, including today. You represent the country that I fell in love with years ago and had the privilege to find refuge in. It is an enormous privilege, which you cannot feel, because you were born and brought up in this country, so somehow it comes by default. It was given to me and is a privilege that I hope I will never betray. I am sure that every person who comes into this country, when they are afforded the welcome that I was, will feel the same.

I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for raising the issue of visas and a system that may have slowed down slightly. What is absolutely necessary is to have a fast and safe route for people who are escaping the terrible circumstances in which they have found themselves, due to the aggression of Russia against their country, Ukraine. I agree with the noble Lord and was pleased to see the unity of Europe—something that I regret we did not have 30 years ago. I am pleased to see that, together, we are giving dignity and the right to defend themselves to the people of Ukraine. That was not afforded to the country of my birth, because of the arms embargo that was imposed as soon as it declared its independence.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, for his philosophical questions. I agree with him that third-country nationals have to be afforded the same rights. They are in the same danger, so have to be given the same rights and safety that is given to our Ukrainian friends.

The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, forensically examined the successes and failures of the last few weeks. I agree with his point about the shortage of staff that may occur during the Easter holidays. I am sure that my noble friend has already taken that into account and that preparations have been made. If we can, we should be doubling the number of people who are dealing with this crisis, rather than revisiting this after Easter.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister for raising the issue of sexual violence and trafficking. I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has already dispatched police and military investigators to the borders, and that interviews will be held. I just caution that, as important as forensic experts are doctors and trauma experts, because the mostly women and girls who have gone through this experience will be deeply traumatised and will find it very difficult to report what has happened to them. At the same time, they will have to go through yet another trauma in explaining in minute detail what the forensic experts will need to find out from them. I am grateful for that issue being raised.

I thank my noble friend Lord Balfe and agree with him that what is happening in Ukraine has been a massive failure of humanity. I also agree that there is a European dimension to this; we are part of this and have to work with our European allies. I hugely support the right we have given our Ukrainian friends to defend their homes. It is very important and it is the best way to defend Ukraine. Right now, they are not only defending their country but defending us. They are defending the Balkans and every part of the world where people want to live in freedom and democracy. The example of a bullying country that has decided to invade its neighbour because it does not like their democratic choices cannot be allowed to stand. I am fully supportive of that and am proud that our Government have taken a forward-leaning policy on this issue.

I also note my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury’s moving response to two Ukrainian young women, Olia and Tonya. I hope that Tonya’s status is soon resolved so that she, together with her sister, can come to Britain and fulfil their dreams, secure in Shropshire. I am sure those circumstances will be very welcoming.

I was very moved to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, about how much has been done in Wales on education and welcoming, and how many people have come forward. I think she mentioned that 10,000 people in Wales have opened their homes to 1,300 applicants. It is important that young people, particularly students, are not just sitting glued to their radios and social media noting what is happening in Ukraine, but that their energy is turned into something positive and that their frustration is turned into ambition, so that they learn to use what we can offer them—not only safety but the exchange of knowledge. That will be extremely important for their mental health and for getting over the trauma they have experienced.

My noble friend Lady Pidding rightly raised the issue of Georgia and the occupied territories. There are no breakaway republics in Georgia. South Ossetia and Abkhazia are Russian-occupied territories, and the same applies to Moldova and Transnistria. I hope that at today’s NATO summit we will offer further help and support to Georgia in particular but also to Moldova, so that their resilience can be enhanced and they can respond if, in some crazy scenario, they find themselves in the same position as Ukraine.

I thank my noble friend Lord Cormack for his kind words about me and my part of the world. It is essential that we get this right, and particularly that this war does not last for ever, because, as he rightly pointed out, Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe and the rest of the world, and there are many people who cannot afford to have yet another meal taken away from them. Whether we are talking about Yemen, Syria or Afghanistan, we have to bear that in mind.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, for her contribution. I completely agree that an application from a four-year-old being approved and the application from their mother not being approved shows that there is a problem that we need to fix. However, I have high hopes for the Minister and I know that he will do his absolute best.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, for his kind words. I occasionally go to a south London school and speak. Some 80% of the children are refugees or migrants, or of refugee or migrant families. I learn much more from them than they learn from me, but I always tell them that they are in a country where they will succeed if they work hard, and that they should not give up. They are fantastic. I would be very pleased to go to any school and speak to anyone if that will be of any help.

I finish by thanking my noble friend and welcoming him to the House. His speech was disarming and it is very difficult to criticise him, at least on this occasion, but we will have our moment in the Chamber and we will be watching every single application, approved and not approved. As he said, we met a long time ago on a visit to Israel. I have been an admirer of his work and what he did for Syrian and Afghan refugees, and now Ukrainian refugees. I hope and pray that this is his last job, that we will never again need a Minister for Refugees, and that the world will come back to its senses. I doubt that it will, so this may be a longer affair than he was preparing for, but I wish him all the best. We could not have a better colleague or a better Minister to take charge of this and fix this problem.

Motion agreed.