Ethnic Minorities: Ministers’ Statements

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Avebury]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what advice they issue to Ministers about making public statements on allegations about the general behaviour of ethnic minorities.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, Ministers are expected to behave in a way which is consistent with the Ministerial Code.

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

My Lords, when Ministers, or officials on their behalf, refer to homeless Travellers as a blight on the community, or as having a negative impact on business, does this not reinforce local authorities’ failure to produce a five-year rolling programme, as required by the Government’s planning policy for Traveller sites? Will they desist from using pejorative language about Travellers and instead embody the PPTS in statute law, with a power for the Secretary of State to direct local authorities to grant permission for such a number of sites and caravans as he may specify, as already happens in Wales?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I think the noble Lord is referring to a DCLG press release of last summer which used the unfortunate term “blight”; the word was shortly afterwards removed and replaced by “problem”. In the previous survey of Travellers’ caravans, there were estimated to be 20,000, of which 15,000 were on authorised sites of one sort or another and another 5,000 were on non-authorised sites.

Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Cox and Lady Kinnock, pointed out, Sudan is governed by an alleged war criminal charged at the International Criminal Court on five counts of crimes against humanity, two of war crimes and three of genocide. He and the Sudanese armed forces, of which he is supreme commander, continue to commit war crimes in Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile. The Satellite Sentinel project reported last week on the repositioning of SAF military units threatening new attacks on the civilian populations of Abeyi and South Kordofan, which have been subjected to more than two years of relentless bombardment.

Might the UN ask member states with satellites that pass over the conflict areas in Sudan to make their own images and analyses available to the Security Council to reinforce the excellent work being done by the Satellite Sentinel Project?

Has my noble friend seen the Rapid Food Security and Nutrition assessment published by the Enough project on South Kordofan? It concludes that the bombardment of civilians, together with the bar on international humanitarian aid, has resulted in severe malnutrition and dire food security outlooks. The authors say that the condition of refugees from Blue Nile state indicates that the conditions there may be comparable with those in South Kordofan. These are further war crimes and the Minister may want to say something about the possibility of further indictments at the ICC.

Another group of victims in a desperate state are the 40,000 South Sudanese who were left behind in Khartoum at the time of independence three years ago. Their camp was flooded and latrines are overflowing, spreading disease to these homeless and stateless people, weakened by malnutrition. The UN Central Emergency Response Fund has allocated $5.5 million for emergency shelter, healthcare, education and public health initiatives for the victims of flooding, including the South Sudanese, but for the latter it is a short-term solution only. The International Organisation for Migration has a plan to airlift 20,000 of the most vulnerable to South Sudan at a cost of $20 million. Can this plan be expanded so that the IOM repatriated all the people to their homeland with the help of donors such as the UN Central Emergency Response Fund?

Meanwhile, UNHCR is already having to cope with 220,000 refugees in South Sudan and another 40,000 in Ethiopia. Can my noble friend say what the budget for these operations in 2013 is and whether it is being met? These people were mostly bombed out of their homes in South Kordofan and Blue Nile and their plight is the direct result of Bashir’s military campaigns against civilians. Now the ground attack is being reinforced by the acquisition of Sukhoi Su-25 aircraft and Mi-24 ground attack helicopters. My noble friend says that these breaches of the UN sanctions will be dealt with by the panel of experts’ report in January 2014, but surely where there is credible evidence, such as we have from Radio Dubanga—a reliable witness in the past—and from the Satellite Sentinel project already mentioned, the Security Council should take prompt action to call Khartoum to account over its breaches of its international obligations.

At the same time, the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights should investigate the wave of extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions as proposed by 11 international and African organisations last week. At least 170 people have been killed and more than 800 detained following widespread protests against the ending of fuel subsidies. Newspapers and broadcasters have been shut down, editors have been told what they are to say about the protests and the head of the Sudanese Doctors’ Union was detained when he spoke on BBC Arabic about the number of casualties admitted to his hospital. The UN rapporteur on extrajudicial executions and the working party on arbitrary detention should collect evidence and report on those events, preferably after visiting Sudan, but in the absence of an invitation, based on witness statements collected in response to a public appeal. I know that that is not the normal method of working by UN special procedures, but their hesitant approach accounts for their lack of effectiveness in stopping these human rights abuses.

How can the international community secure an improvement in Khartoum’s behaviour? The IMF persuaded the regime to cancel fuel subsidies in an attempt to control its rocketing external debt, scheduled to reach $46 billion this year. But the US special envoy to South Sudan and Sudan, Donald Booth, said last month that Khartoum is spending the same on military operations in Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile as it did on the fuel subsidies. If the IMF made the ending of these conflicts and of purchases of sophisticated foreign military equipment a condition of debt relief, there would be a double benefit to the Sudanese economy and to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Khartoum’s aggression.

Human Rights: Burma

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I can confirm that the first thing that Aung San Suu Kyi asked the British Government to do was to appoint a defence attaché to Burma some months ago. We are now offering military training to a number of Burmese officers in this country to help them through the transition. Requests have also been made to assist in retraining the Burmese police. These are all things that we think will help through a transition—not, of course, towards full democracy and a perfect resolution of all these problems, but we see the situation as improving. We are doing our best not only to help it to improve but to monitor how far it goes.

[Lord Avebury]

When the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, raised the Human Rights Watch report on ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity against Rohingya Muslims in Arakan state, she was told that it clearly needed to be supported by further evidence. What has happened to the independent investigative commission announced by the Burmese Government as long ago as last September? Is it going to be established in the near future? To ensure its credibility, will my noble friend suggest to the Burmese that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, be asked to nominate the members of that commission?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I will have to write to the noble Lord with a specific answer to his question, but I can confirm that Alan Duncan, from the Department for International Development, was in Rakhine state in June, that my noble friend Lady Warsi was looking at the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar shortly before that, and that British officials are very regularly in and out of Rakhine state.

Digital Strategy

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, things are actually moving quite fast. This is not simply something that central government are attempting to impose. I am encouraged by how much is being done at the local level by voluntary organisations and by partnerships between the public and the private sectors. The assisted digital scheme is intended to pull a number of these together and make sure that they are encouraged to help precisely in those areas of the country where digital skills are least well developed. The speed at which people are moving over to digital as mobile smartphones expand is very rapid.

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, I am sure my noble friend is aware that according to the Office for National Statistics, 3.8 million disabled people have never used the internet. How are those people going to claim universal credit when the applications have to be made online? If they all go to the centres that he mentioned, will they not be completely overwhelmed?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that is precisely what the assisted digital and digital inclusion schemes are intended to deal with. They encourage people to learn how to use the internet themselves and, where they find it difficult to do so, to assist them and advise them on how to gain the access they need.

Antarctic Bill

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Friday 1st February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery, on his skill in introducing the Bill and wish him every success in piloting it through this House, with his long experience and great knowledge of the Antarctic. I congratulate my honourable friend the Member for Stroud on choosing this important subject for his Private Member’s Bill and on his skill in piloting it successfully through another place.

The Antarctic is a region of tremendous political, scientific and environmental importance, and I am delighted to support this Bill today. The Antarctic Treaty, and the related agreements described together as the Antarctic Treaty System, is a great achievement, reserving as it does the whole of the land and ice shelves south of 60 degrees latitude for scientific research and excluding all military activity in the region. This was largely a British achievement as my honourable friend emphasised in another place, and we were the first to ratify the treaty in 1961.

Britain not only played a leading role in the development of the ATS, but we continue to provide an effective and powerful contribution to scientific research on the continent for the benefit of mankind as a whole through the British Antarctic Survey. I was delighted when the Government decided, on the basis of solid evidence, rehearsed here and in another place, to maintain the independence of the BAS. That outcome was a good example of Parliament working together with the Government to avert a serious error of judgment, and I am pleased to see that the BAS is specifically referred to in the Bill, as my honourable friend the Member for Cambridge pointed out in Committee in another place. If my noble friend the Minister could say anything about the timescale for the appointment of the new director, I am sure that would be appreciated by your Lordships.

This Bill tightens the protection of the Antarctic environment by enabling us to bring into force the mechanisms in the liability annex to the protocol, “Liability Arising from Environmental Emergencies”. The simple description of this process is that the polluter pays, as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, explained. Every person, public or private, who organises an activity in Antarctica must take reasonable, prompt and effective action to deal with an environmental emergency, defined as an event which threatens or results in significant harm to the environment. Operators are required to insure against liabilities that may arise under this provision. The explanation by the Minister in another place of how the limits on liability in the schedule complement those in the 1996 protocol to the limitation of liability for maritime claims generally under the 1996 protocol was not entirely clear, and I look forward to discussing that with my noble friend the Minister, although I have no intention of delaying the Bill.

The most likely type of major environmental disaster to happen is the loss of, or spillage of oil from, a tourist vessel. The “Nordkapp” ran aground near Deception Island and spilled 757 litres of diesel oil, for instance, while the “Explorer”, with 150 passengers on board, sank near the South Shetland Islands in November 2007. Recently, much larger cruise ships have sailed into these waters, and, considering that the UK-occupied sections of the territory are the most popular destinations, I wonder whether the Government would consider imposing a charge for permits based on the number of passengers carried. Looking at the fees charged by the tour operators, £500 per passenger would not be an unreasonable levy, enabling us to accumulate a fund to cover some or all of the clean-up costs that were not within the maximum liability. I dare say the Minister will point out that if other parties to the liability annex did not impose similar levies, the operators would seek permits from state parties where the cost was lowest. Have the Government broached this subject with the other parties and would they take a lead on the matter, bearing in mind their general disposition to recover the cost to the taxpayer of providing all kinds of services?

The larger the volume of tourism to Antarctica, the greater the danger to its fragile environment. That applies particularly to the UK dependencies, which are the most popular destinations, such as Deception Island and the South Sandwich Islands. A charging regime such as I am suggesting would help to slow down the growth of the traffic, as well as providing a shield against recovery costs that exceed the limits in the schedule.

Tourism is not the only threat to Antarctica’s environment. Large-scale fishing operations have developed in recent years, and my noble friend will be able to confirm that they are not covered by the Bill. The activities carried out in Antarctica which are dealt with in Part 1 are defined in Clause 13(9) as those carried out on a British expedition, defined in turn in Section 3(3) of the Antarctic Act 1994 as an expedition organised or starting from the UK. That would seem to include the tourist ships but not fishing vessels, which are treated separately in the 1994 Act. If my interpretation is correct, does this not leave a gaping hole in the Bill, and presumably in the underlying “liability annex”, since fishing vessels are no less likely to have accidents that pollute the environment than tourist ships?

New Zealand discovered the toothfish in the Ross Sea in 1996 and now some 3,000 tonnes of this fish are caught every year and sold as Chilean sea bass in expensive restaurants around the world. The New Zealand NGO, The Last Ocean, has initiated a campaign to ban commercial fishing altogether in the Ross Sea, claiming that it will destroy the natural ecosystem. The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, CCAMLR, has committed to designating a network of marine protected areas, including the Ross Sea, but according to The Last Ocean, that means allowing commercial fishing, including krill trawlers. The CCAMLR was established in 1982 by an international convention to conserve Antarctic marine life, but that does not exclude harvesting as long as it is sustainable and takes account of fishing’s effects on other components of the ecosystem.

The Antarctic Treaty System prohibits exploitation of natural resources on the land mass of Antarctica, but the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources allows for conditional exploitation of marine resources, including krill. The president of the World Bank and the noble Lord, Lord Stern, both issued warnings at Davos last week of far more serious climate change than has so far been predicted. As drought and floods reduce agricultural production, there will be huge pressure to loosen the controls on the abundant source of food in Antarctica.

It seems that there is a possible conflict between the objectives of the CCAMLR and the purpose of this Bill, which is to reduce the likelihood of environmental emergencies anywhere south of 60 degrees latitude, and to provide the resources for dealing with the situation when emergencies do occur. Allowing more shipping into sensitive areas such as the Ross Sea is bound to increase the risk of accidents, in addition to the risk of disturbing the ecosystem if the scientists who advise the CCAMLR get it wrong. Yet the duty to take preventive measures and make contingency plans in Clause 5 does not apply to fishing operators, nor will they be required to notify the Secretary of State as soon as they become aware of an environmental emergency. They may be required to pay compensation for any environmental emergency they cause under the Merchant Shipping Act 1995, but not to the Antarctic Environmental Liability Fund, as would be the case if they were subject to the Bill. Can my noble friend explain whether, in the event of an environmental emergency caused by a ship which is not an expedition, that fund receives compensation, or alternatively, how the operators can be made to pay the recoverable costs of the response action? In practice, the costs of recovery will fall on the BAS, and there must surely be a procedure for its reimbursement where ships that are not expeditions get into trouble.

I have a couple more questions about Part 1. What are the criteria that determine the threshold of an environmental emergency? In January 2007, the “Nordkapp”, operated by Hurtigruten, hit a rock near Deception Island and, as I said earlier, lost 757 litres of diesel fuel into the ocean. In December 2008, the “Ushuaia”, run by Fathom Expeditions, ran aground near Wilhelmina Bay and lost an unreported amount of diesel fuel, and there may well be other similar accidents that I have not been able to identify. Would these events have come under the provisions of the Bill, and what is the limit below which a loss of fuel need not be reported? Who is paying for the clean-up of the pollution caused by marine accidents generally in Antarctica now and until the liability annex comes into force?

The annex will come into force only when all the 28 parties to the protocol have ratified it, and when we have passed this Bill that will make only six out of the 28. My honourable friend the Minister said at Committee stage in another place that we would then encourage the remaining countries to get a move on with their own ratifications. Bearing in mind that it has taken seven and a half years since the adoption of the annex for less than a quarter of the states to ratify it, I hope this does not mean that the rest are going to delay implementation until 2035. If my noble friend can say anything about the prospects for accelerating the process, it might cheer us up.

On Part 2 I shall be very brief. I warmly welcome Clause 14, which allows multinational teams from UK universities to undertake research in a special area, provided the domestic legislation of their home country allows them to do so. My question here is whether this means that only nationals of the other five countries that have already ratified the annex can participate in our university expeditions, or whether any of the others have already made arrangements to grant their citizens the necessary permission.

With regard to the historic sites, I note that there are two that are co-managed with Chile and one that is co-managed with Argentina. Mawson’s Huts, remaining from the heroic Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14, described in last Sunday’s Observer, are an exclusively Australian responsibility, but Sir Douglas himself was Yorkshire born and three of the 22 members of his expedition were British. Is there some way in which the UK might contribute expertise or resources to the management of Mawson’s Huts in recognition of our role in an enterprise which equalled those of Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greenway]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Montgomery for introducing this important Bill. I shall not wax lyrical about Antarctica like the noble Lord who has just spoken because I have not been there, although I have been ice-breaking up in the Arctic.

As your Lordships would expect, I shall confine my remarks basically to the maritime side of the Bill and, in particular, to cruise ships, which have been mentioned by a number of noble Lords.

Under the Bill, any vessel visiting Antarctica has a duty to have contingency plans in the event of an environmental emergency there. There is also a need to have adequate insurance cover or other financial security to cover liabilities in the event of an environmental emergency. The UK Chamber of Shipping and the International Group of P&I Clubs—that is, protection and indemnity clubs—raised some concerns while the Bill was going through the other place. They thought that it needed to be made clear that the liability limits found in existing conventions which allow ship operators to limit liability, as ratified by the UK, would be respected in implementing this Bill’s limits for environmental emergencies. Several exchanges took place and I believe that a ministerial Statement was made in the other place to try to quantify those concerns. I hope that the Minister can confirm that under this Bill the liability provisions will come in only when existing liability provisions, already ratified, have exhausted themselves.

There are a number of maritime conventions to which this country has provided ratification and which cover specific liabilities in relation to oil pollution and so on. For liabilities not covered by these conventions, there is the right to limit liability under the Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims—the LLMC—of 1976, to which a protocol was added in 1996. In essence, the right to limit liability for ships or ship-source pollution stems from the need for the risk to be quantifiable, and therefore insurable, with the advantage of prompt settlement of claims arising from such incidents. I should be grateful if the Minister could confirm that.

I was interested in the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, that ships should be charged according to the number of passengers on board. The larger ships which used to visit Antarctica are not doing so so often now. They are mainly smaller ships—including expedition ships, as has been mentioned. A lot of them are former Russian ships which are ice-strengthened, and the Russian masters are very well versed in dealing with ice conditions.

[Lord Avebury]

Advertised tours include ships as large as 260 passengers. That seems to be about the maximum.

[Lord Greenway]

Yes, 260 passengers is a very small cruise ship these days when some of them can take 4,000 passengers. We are talking about fairly small ships. My understanding is that no large British ship has been there for a number of years and certainly no British ship is scheduled to visit this year. Basically, this Bill relates to the UK. Ships that belong to other countries, some of which have not ratified some of these conventions, are a different matter and there is concern about them.

I understand that the International Maritime Organisation is in the process of developing a new mandatory polar shipping code which could be completed next year but we do not know yet whether it will be. That was activated by the sinking of the “Explorer”, which the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, mentioned. These things are not always as simple as they seem. My feeling is that companies feel that it is difficult for the larger ships to visit Antarctica because, quite simply, there are too many people on board to go ashore. That is why smaller ships are being used.

This is a very worthwhile Bill and I think that it should be passed expeditiously.

Saudi Arabia

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, has given us the opportunity of discussing human rights in Saudi Arabia today, and I congratulate him on his very forthright speech introducing the debate this evening. In spite of its egregious human rights record, it is seldom discussed on the Floor of the House. I looked back over the present Session and found only two occasions. The first took place when the noble Lord himself introduced a debate at Question Time in terms very similar to the one that we are having this evening; the second was introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, at the end of October. On that occasion, by the way, my noble friend Lady Falkner asked the Minister how the UK voted when Saudi Arabia was elected to the board of UN Women; the Minister has not yet complied with the undertaking to write to her on that matter. Perhaps he could tell us now, and at the same time explain how Saudi Arabia came to be a member of the UN Human Rights Council when human rights are non-existent at home.

The Foreign Office’s annual report on human rights and democracy shows that in Saudi Arabia the rule of law does not apply because judges apply their own interpretation of Sharia law, including their own arbitrary variations in punishments for the same offence. The death penalty is applied to many different offences, including sorcery, drug-smuggling, homosexuality and apostasy. Minors are not exempt, as we see from the case of the 17 year-old Sri Lankan housemaid, Rizana Nafeek, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of an infant left in her charge. Torture is widespread, but the FCO fails to mention the frequent use of the cruel and unusual punishment of flogging, as in the case of the Australian, Mansor Almaribe, who was on hajj when he was arrested and convicted of insulting companions of the Prophet and sentenced to 500 lashes and a year’s imprisonment, although he suffers from diabetes and heart disease and is very unlikely to survive that punishment. The US State Department gives details of reported cases of torture and flogging. Freedom of expression is strictly limited. Newspapers can be closed down without appeal. A journalist was sentenced to 50 lashes for reporting a protest against electricity price rises. There is absolutely no freedom of religion.

The Shia minority, which amounts to 20 per cent of the population, is severely repressed. Unfortunately, the FCO only devotes one short paragraph to this problem and gives no details. There is now major unrest among the 2 million Shia in the Eastern Province, and, as in Syria, demonstrators are being shot dead by the police. A 20 year-old student, Nasser al-Muhaishi, was killed on 21 November when live ammunition was used against demonstrators, also injuring a woman and a child. The young man’s body was not handed over to his family for burial, which triggered a further demonstration, during which another youth, Ali al-Filfil, was killed and seven others injured. After 70,000 took to the streets to protest against these killings, finally the bodies of the two young men were handed over, but, during the funeral processions, two more were killed, 26 year-old Abdullah Iqriris and 22 year-old Munib al-Adnan. Twelve further persons were injured, two of them critically. On 6 December, a group of 62 Saudi intellectuals issued a statement condemning the killings, holding the Government responsible, and calling for freedom of expression and an end to sectarianism. Now these human rights defenders are being threatened by the official media on the grounds that they are inciting violence and undermining national unity. I hope that my noble friend can say that we will condemn the use of lethal force by the authorities, as well as the use of torture against detainees and the arrests of thousands of political dissidents, which have been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed.

In April 2009, Bill Rammell MP, then Minister of State at the Foreign Office, wrote to me saying that we were,

“engaged with the Saudi Government to encourage their tolerance of, and respect for, the Shia community”.

Well, we have been singularly unsuccessful in this aim, because there is a constant stream of complaints from the Eastern Province about the prohibition on the building of mosques, arbitrary arrests of leading community dignitaries, raids on private houses where the Shia meet for prayer, and the prohibition on Shia worshippers joining in prayers at Sunni mosques.

As we have already heard, women are allowed to work only in a very few occupations, and then only with other women. All women are subordinate to a male relative, contrary to an undertaking given by Saudi Arabia to the UN Human Rights Council that it would abolish the male guardianship system. Girl children can be married off at the age of 12. I expect that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, will have seen the report in the Sunday Telegraph a week ago about the cleric who said that if women were allowed to drive, they would be “driven to lust”. The highest religious council chipped in and said that it would be the end of virginity in the country, and a young mother convicted of persistently flouting the ban on women drivers was sentenced to 10 lashes in Jeddah in September in spite of the king's promise to grant her a pardon.

Anti-Semitism is rife and foreign workers, of whom there are almost 8.5 million in the kingdom, are often the victims of violent abuse by their employers, who enjoy almost total impunity. The FCO says that this issue is raised frequently with the Saudi Government, the Shura Council and the media, but it has nothing to say about the success or otherwise of all these representations. The FCO appears to think that we can alleviate the horrendous violations reported in its annual report and covered in far more detail and more effectively in the State Department equivalent, by remonstrations and cosmetic bits of aid which are supposed, for example, to encourage reforms at the Ministry of Justice, promote discussion in the Shura Council on the minimum age of marriage and adulthood, and to sponsor talks about the regulation of foreign workers’ rights.

If the Saudi Government had the political will, they could perfectly well undertake these initiatives themselves. It is not at all clear whether any of the glacially slow reforms that are actually or potentially occurring are in fact accelerated by the UK’s initiatives. On the contrary, it could be that the authorities play along with our no doubt well meaning attempts to influence them in the direction of human rights and democracy as a means of averting stronger criticism of the kind they have to put up with from human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. It would be very interesting if my noble friend the Minister could say something about the incongruity of spending UK taxpayers’ money on these puny initiatives when the Saudi hereditary dictatorship is rolling in billions of dollars of oil money. I would also like to hear from my noble friend what the Government’s attitude is to the use of those billions to fund the Salafist ideology which is being promulgated in mosques and madrasas throughout the Arab world and in south Asia that are the mainspring of terrorism and the indirect cause of the deaths of hundreds of British servicemen in Afghanistan. This ideology which sanctions the use of violence against all who think differently is the reason why the Christians of the Middle East are being squeezed out of the region, as the most reverend Primate said in your Lordships’ debate on Friday. He might have added that they are being squeezed out of Pakistan and other Islamic countries as well.

However, not only Christians are under fire throughout the Islamic world. Last Wednesday, 55 worshippers, celebrating the festival of Ashura, were killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul, while in the Pakistani city of Lahore, 93 worshippers at two separate Ahmadiyya mosques were murdered in terrorist attacks in May 2010. Dozens of assassinations of persons belonging to minority Islamic sects as well as attacks on their places of worship have been reported in recent years and yet there has been hardly any attempt to examine the ideological sources of terrorist movements such as al-Qaeda or al-Shabaab, or even to analyse the literature being used in the madrassahs where the leaders of these movements were educated. I would like my noble friend to say what the FCO is doing, together with the European Union and others, to counter the hate-filled propaganda which motivates terrorists and to expose those who are funding it.

Finally, I request my noble friend to use whatever influence we have with the Saudi regime to persuade it to withdraw its troops from Bahrain, where they are propping up another hereditary despotism. In 1956, when the Hungarian Communist Party invited Soviet troops in to quell unrest, the international community rightly decided that it was a breach of the UN charter. The same verdict was passed on Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1958, and on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which followed an invitation by President Babrak Karmal. These incursions were violations of Article 2(4) of the UN charter because the Governments of the states concerned were manifestly not representative of their people, and the same is true of the situation in Bahrain. The Saudi troops there may have been used solely to guard critical installations but in so doing they released the local security forces to attack and murder demonstrators and to arbitrarily arrest and torture thousands of Bahraini citizens.

The Saudi regime cannot last indefinitely, any more than the dictatorships of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt or Syria. The ideal would be a managed transition over a period to a constitutional monarchy, or an elected shura with legislative power, and a Government of the majority with the right to appoint Ministers. However, if that is going to happen, I think it will be as a result of internal and regional forces and not because of the worthy but ineffectual attempts to reconcile Wahhabi absolutism with international norms of human rights and democracy. Whatever influence we do have should be directed towards preventing the spread of the pernicious ideology of the Saudi clerics to the rest of the Islamic world.

Sudan

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Wednesday 5th October 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Avebury]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they propose to take at the United Nations Security Council on the attacks by Sudanese armed forces on civilians in Blue Nile state.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are greatly concerned at the ongoing violence in Blue Nile state since hostilities started on 2 September. We continue to work closely with our international partners to push for an immediate cessation of hostilities, including through the UN Security Council, where we will again underline our concerns tomorrow, 6 October.

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, President al-Bashir has launched a full-scale onslaught against the people in the area of Kurmuk using armour, artillery and helicopter gunships, and has refused UN offers of mediation, effectively tearing up the framework agreement on which the Security Council relied in its last resolution of 1997. Does my noble friend not agree that it is therefore necessary for the UN to adopt new measures to prevent this conflict escalating into a cross-border war between the peoples of north and south and to protect the people of the Blue Nile and South Kordofan from incipient genocide?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there were several questions in there, but I think it would be premature to make such a strong statement on whether this is incipient genocide. We recognise that it has taken a very long time to negotiate an end to the conflict between South Sudan and Sudan and that it has left a number of unresolved conflicts in the border region in Abyei, South Kordofan and Blue Nile. We are extremely concerned that conflict has broken out in a violent form since Sudanese troops deposed the governor of Blue Nile province on 2 September. The noble Lord will be well aware that it is extremely difficult to arrange humanitarian access into the region or, indeed, for outsiders to discover exactly what is going on within the region, but we are doing our best.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The statement that hundreds of thousands of southerners are locked into the north is part of the problem. The borders having been drawn, those who live north of the border are formally Sudanese and not South Sudanese. This is a very large and ethnically diverse country and it needs governing with a great deal more delicacy than a highly authoritarian centralised Government in Khartoum appear to wish for. One should certainly mention, among others who should be playing an active role, the Arab League. Qatar has been very helpful in attempting to provide a structure of negotiation in Darfur, unfortunately not involving all the rebel forces in Darfur. Britain is willing to work with all others—the Ethiopian Government, the Qatari Government, the Arab League, the Chinese as far as we can and the Russians, as far as we can again, to bring all pressures we can to stop this fighting.

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, since the UN Security Council is meeting tomorrow in any case to consider the situation in Abyei, could my noble friend ask for this problem to be placed on the agenda so that it can at least consider the evidence that is available, such as the 25,000 refugees who have fled across the border into Ethiopia, the Satellite Sentinel project evidence concerning the movement of large forces on the ground, and the evidence that my noble friend Lady Cox talked about of people fleeing from the Blue Nile into the south?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I in no way underestimate the threats to personal safety across this large region. Members of the APPG for Sudan will know that there have also been stories of fairly large-scale conflict across South Sudan. Cattle-raiding now takes place in South Sudan with AK-47s as part of what is happening. There are some complicated issues, and it is certainly the case that the comprehensive peace agreement might break down. Her Majesty’s Government are well aware of that and we are talking with other Governments within the UN and other international contexts to see what help we can provide.