Human Rights

Baroness Morris of Bolton Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Bolton]

My Lords, this is an important moment in the development of what the Foreign Secretary, my right honourable friend William Hague, has termed “foreign policy with a conscience”. I pay tribute to noble Lords, Members of another place, the Diplomatic Service, NGOs and all women and men who are working tirelessly and with deep commitment to advance human rights in remote corners of the earth, and who keep human rights abuses on the agenda of Her Majesty’s Government. In this respect, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, on her maiden speech and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on his dedication and passion in standing up for the oppressed and dispossessed. I, too, am full of admiration for the noble Lord, and I thank him for giving us the opportunity to debate these vital issues today. Lastly, I pay tribute to my party’s human rights commission on its excellent work.

For the purpose of this debate, I declare my interests as a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, chairman of the Conservative Middle East Council, vice-chairman of the Britain-Palestine All-Party Parliamentary Group and a trustee of UNICEF UK. I will focus my remarks on two areas in which I have a particular interest and where the plight of the people should make us all stop and think. They are the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gaza. These two places face very different conditions, but each tells a tale of the crushing of human spirit and the waste of human potential. Each requires immediate, collective and effective measures by the humanitarian community and major aid donors.

The situation of women in the DRC, which was recently described as the rape capital of the world, is dire. From the start of the war, Congolese women and young girls have been systematically targeted by all parties to the conflict. It is so bad that Vava Tampa, the founding director of Save the Congo, has said that every woman is a rape victim in waiting. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield stated so powerfully, the use of rape to punish, displace or destroy women and communities in times of conflict is well documented. However, what makes the raping of women and girls, and sometimes of men and baby boys, in the Congo most tragic is its blood-chilling scale, its effect on the social fabric of Congolese society, and the disastrous consequences for the Congo and the Great Lakes region for many years to come. I hope my noble friend the Minister can tell us what we are doing to ensure that appropriate mechanisms are put in place to end the growing culture of impunity that lies behind the cycle of atrocities in the Congo.

John Ging, a most inspirational man and director of operations in Gaza for the UN Relief and Works Agency, said recently:

“We have run out of words to describe how bad it is here”.

A month ago, I returned from a trip to Gaza. I was enormously moved by the plight of the people, and three things I saw have made a lasting impression. The first was a visit to the al-Shifa hospital, where vital medical equipment lies idle because of a lack of spare parts, and where we met patients denied permission to leave Gaza for life-saving treatment, often without any explanation given as to why that permission had been denied. I implore the Government to use all the diplomacy at their disposal to ensure that the medical needs of the people of Gaza are met.

The second visit to make a lasting impression was to an UNRWA food distribution centre where proud, well-educated men and women were queuing for their quarterly rations of food. Eighty per cent of the population of Gaza receives food aid, yet there has been no flood, no failure of crops and no earthquake, just a shutdown of the system that denies the people the chance to work because there are no jobs, and there are no jobs because they cannot import materials, they cannot manufacture goods and they cannot export. Nor can they travel to Israel any more to the jobs they used to enjoy. I have to tell your Lordships that I felt deep shame, and I pay tribute to the decency, good humour and enormous resilience of the Palestinian people, who wish to be good neighbours to Israel and who have so much to offer to the world.

Finally, I visited a human rights class in an UNRWA school in the Beach refugee camp. There, despite their circumstances, the 15 year-old girls were beautifully dressed. They were attentive, clever and articulate, and their grasp of human rights and the attendant responsibilities to people of all backgrounds and all religions or none would put most grown-ups in the western world to shame, and would have gladdened the heart of the noble Lord, Lord Sacks. At the end of the lesson I was asked by one of the girls whether I thought they had a future to look forward to. I hope I was right when I said yes.