Queen’s Speech

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in expressing pleasure at the Government’s commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national product on development assistance starting next year. I do not share the concern that some of your Lordships have expressed at the fact that this is not in the legislation. I am pleased to accept the solid commitment that our Government have made, from which I do not think there is any possible chance of backsliding. We can wait for the legislation until some time later in this Parliament.

Our aid programme is one of the most cost-effective in the world, and as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Global Action Against Childhood Pneumonia, I particularly congratulate the Government on being the largest contributor to the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunisation. I was delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Jay, on this subject. None of the money which we contribute to the GAVI Alliance goes into someone’s back pocket. That is one of the reasons why I applaud the Government’s decision to be the largest contributor to this project. I am very proud that we are helping to protect the lives of children, among others, in the Somali refugee camps of Dadaab in Kenya and Dolo Ado in Ethiopia, which together hold some 650,000 refugees.

My noble friend Lord Sheikh and Malcolm Bruce MP were in Bangladesh last year on World Pneumonia Day urging that country to press forward with its plans to vaccinate children against pneumonia and rotavirus, which together kill 1.5 million children every year. The noble Lord, Lord Boateng, was in Ghana only last month helping to celebrate the rollout of vaccines against both those diseases. Will the Government continue to respond to the GAVI Alliance’s appeals as new vaccines are developed, such as the two which have now been approved against HPV, the cause of cervical cancer that kills many hundreds of thousands of women every year?

The gracious Speech says that the Government will work to bring greater stability to the Horn of Africa, and the London Conference on Somalia in February was a great success, not least because it allowed for independent participation by Somaliland, which is already de facto a stable and democratic state with which I am glad to say the UK has close relations. I understand why the Government are not going to be the first to recognise Somaliland’s independence, but can we not encourage moves within IGAD and the AU towards regional and continental acceptance of Somaliland’s right of self-determination? I also welcome the EU’s helicopter operations against pirates, which have been mentioned, and I hope that now we have these assets off the coast of Somalia, we might consider, with the EU, also helping AMISOM, which has no helicopters, in the operation that I hope will take place to occupy Kismayo and deny that port to al-Shabaab.

I was glad to hear the Minister say that we will uphold human rights and religious freedom. With Pakistan’s universal periodic review coming up soon, I hope the Government will be taking a robust line on the failure to protect minorities in that country. The blasphemy laws bear harshly on Ahmadiyya Muslims. They are denied the right to vote, and the law brands them as non-Muslims. In the armed forces, or if they apply for a post at a university or in the civil service, they suffer discrimination, and there is a glass ceiling above which they will not get promotion, whatever their merits. Worse, there is a chorus of hate speech against Ahmadis from Salafist mosques and madrassahs, and from a perfectly lawful organisation, the Khatm-e-Nubuwwat. Regularly, members of the community are assassinated in cold blood or are arrested on trumped-up charges and gratuitously tortured and Ahmadi mosques are destroyed by terrorists. My noble friend says that we make frequent representations to Pakistan, but this does not work because the situation of Ahmadis and other religious minorities gets worse every year. Can we not consider more effective methods of bringing home to Pakistan and, for that matter, to Indonesia and other Islamic states, that religious pluralism and freedom are mandatory, not optional extras to other human rights?

Bangladesh has not been infected so badly with the virus of Salafism although it has periodic outbreaks of persecution. As co-chair of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission, I am particularly concerned with the failure to implement the CHT peace accords of 1997 in accordance with the pledge in the Awami League manifesto, which has been repeated several times since the election by the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The military remain present in the CHT in force, land grabs by settlers against indigenous people continue and violence against indigenous people is perpetrated with impunity. What can we and the European Union do to help Sheikh Hasina solve these problems, and particularly to sort out the dysfunctional land commission?

In Bahrain, after 15 months of bloodshed, torture, extrajudicial executions, and arbitrary detention of human rights activists, there is no sign of an Arab spring. The four leading human rights activists in the country are in custody, two of them awaiting retrial before a civilian court having already been tried before a military court and held, pending that trail, incommunicado for weeks and finally sentenced to life imprisonment. Yet Ministers were content to let the Formula 1 race go ahead amid the misery and mayhem. Worse, they advised Her Majesty the Queen to invite King Hamad, the hereditary dictator, to come here for the Jubilee celebrations. I realise that diplomatic requirements have compelled Her Majesty to meet some gross human rights violators over the 60 years of her reign, but is it not nauseating that in this Jubilee year she will have to shake the hand that is stained with the blood of dozens of the regime's victims? Let it be clear to those who believe in human rights and democracy that King Hamad is not welcome at the Jubilee celebrations.

Finally, on the Chagos Islands, the European court will soon declare on the admissibility of the islanders’ claim for the right of return to the outer islands. The Foreign Secretary was in favour of a “just and fair settlement” when he was in opposition, but now he says that the FCO’s policy is not to be changed until after the Strasbourg court gives its decision. Meanwhile, the judgment is expected imminently in the judicial review proceedings against the Foreign Office in regard to the marine protected area. Colin Roberts, then FCO director of overseas territories, told US embassy political counsellor Richard Mills on 12 May 2009 that,

“establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago’s former residents”.

According to the Government’s thinking on the reserve, as Mr Roberts put it,

“there would be ‘no .. Man Fridays’ on the BIOT’s uninhabited islands”.

This was the real reason for creating the MPA. I ask my noble friend whether the FCO’s position can be reviewed now that its motive has been exposed and whether it will now reconsider settling out of court rather than persisting with expensive trials on which it has already spent over £3 million—not counting the cost of the Civil Service and Treasury solicitors—in which its chances of success must be reduced?