Sudan

Debate between Lord Anderson of Swansea and Lord Benyon

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

There are a lot of questions there, and all very pertinent. On the last one, we gave £600,000 last year to the Sudan Witness organisation. and I am sure we will give more in the future. We hope it is compiling a record of the atrocities and that we will be able to bring those people to justice.

The noble Lord may have seen the interview my colleague, Andrew Mitchell, gave in Chad, where he saw many of the displaced people. He was incredibly moved by what he saw, and nobody who sees this can have a different emotion. The most frustrating thing is our inability to act. We have doubled our bilateral aid to Sudan and we are supporting neighbouring countries. I was in Paris on Monday at the international meeting on Sudan, where €2 billion was promised to Sudan. But if we cannot get the aid in and we cannot stop the conflict—the Sudan Government have closed the border with Chad—it is incredibly frustrating. But I will work with the noble Lord, the all-party group and others, listening to any suggestions they have for alleviating this problem.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, quite possibly the two rival leaders will slug it out at the expense of the people until one is killed or goes into exile. Do the Government see any hint of compromise at all between the two rivals?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

To be frank, no. The warring parties have clearly come to the view that there is no benefit to their aspirations in ceasing the conflict. Until one or both realise that this is the case, we will continue to put pressure on them and on those who continue to support them. We have just announced another raft of sanctions. At some point, those supplying them with the weapons, those carrying out the atrocities and those perpetrating this conflict have to realise that it has to stop.

Situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Debate between Lord Anderson of Swansea and Lord Benyon

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

None of these solutions is entirely in our gift. We do not have the ability to wave a wand or send a gunboat or do all the things that Foreign Ministers might have done in centuries past. It comes down to really hard work and old-fashioned diplomacy. That is what my noble friend the Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister, other Ministers, my noble friend Lord Ahmad—who has been ceaselessly working on this—and the Diplomatic Service have been trying to draw together. We think we have a thread which can lead towards a solution. We have to be positive about this. If you just think of the world as it exists—my noble friend referred to 8 October, the day after the attack—it is so bleak and depressing that you can hardly see a way forward. But there is a solution and we know it can work. It comes down to working with our partners, and, most of all, working with the Government of Israel and with sensible people in the Occupied Territories, to make sure that we can have a solution which is free of Hamas and gives lasting security to the Palestinian people and Israeli citizens.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, do the Government assume that alternative sources of finance for humanitarian aid, which the Minister mentioned, will make up for the loss of financial aid currently going to UNRWA? Clearly, the Government are radically revising their policy at the moment and have set out these five important conditions. So far as the two-state solution is concerned, are the Government going to wait for the slowest? Will they wait for a consensus among their allies? What will they deem to be necessary before they accept a two-state solution? On the other matter, is the Minister confident that the Palestinian Authority is ready to assume responsibility for the West Bank and Gaza?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend the Foreign Secretary met the President of the Occupied West Bank Territories, Mahmoud Abbas, and will continue to talk to him to find, I hope, precisely that solution. On the noble Lord’s first point, on UNRWA, as I said, we have given to UNRWA what we were going to give this financial year, and the additional sums that we are promising will still get, in aid, to the people of Gaza through a variety of sources that I listed earlier.

Gender Equality

Debate between Lord Anderson of Swansea and Lord Benyon

Wednesday 24th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right. Throughout the White Paper, a theme of trying to focus our development support on women’s and girls’ projects is justified by the fact that if you are doing the right thing for women and girls, you tend to be doing the right thing across the development piece. She is right that what is happening in Afghanistan is appalling. We have repeatedly condemned the Taliban’s decision to restrict the rights of women and girls, including through UN Security Council and Human Rights Council resolutions and public statements. The UK is committed to ensuring the delivery of humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan, including the continued participation of female aid workers and full access of women and girls to humanitarian services.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, unsustainably high fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa—for example up to eight births per woman in Niger—lead to poverty, desertification, conflict and emigration and are surely unsustainable. I welcome the Government’s reply so far and ask the Minister to continue to ensure that the status of women is high in our priorities and that therefore, over time, this will lead to an easing of the pressures on population, particularly if we insist that women are educated for longer.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right and there are some stark statistics here. But the advantage from the global perspective is that every £1 spent on contraceptive services beyond the current level would save £3 on the cost of maternal, newborn and abortion care by reducing unintended pregnancies. Over 800 women or girls die every day due to pregnancy or childbirth complications and at least 200 million women and girls alive today, living in 31 countries, have undergone female genital mutilation. These are stark statistics and underpin the determination to address this area in our bilateral aid.

Sudan and South Sudan

Debate between Lord Anderson of Swansea and Lord Benyon

Monday 27th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right. The UK led the renewal of the mandate for the UN Integrated Transitional Assistance Mission in Sudan on 2 June to ensure that the UNITAMS process would have the most effective mandate possible to address the crisis in Sudan. She is absolutely right: there are 6.2 million people displaced, 1.2 million of them in neighbouring countries. As penholder on Sudan at the Security Council, we work in close partnership with the UN, including on how the UN can best support the Sudanese people going forwards. We will continue to work with Sudan and other interested parties on this ahead of the expiry of the UNITAMs mandate on 3 December. It is absolutely vital that all countries are doing their bit to try to assist the people who are suffering most in this terrible conflict.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, the conflict in Sudan is tragically forgotten by the world. The UN is paralysed, while the African Union stands on the other side and watches what happens. There is no real prospect yet of a ceasefire or any positive movement, so what can the Government do? As a penholder, can we persuade other Governments to increase support for the aid agencies as the tragedy unfolds?