Lord Bates
Main Page: Lord Bates (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Bates (Con)
My Lords, in addition to thanking the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing this timely debate, I thank him for all he does in advocating for the rights of those most in need around the world. We are grateful for the challenging and powerful way he has opened this debate.
My focus is on the mechanisms that are in place to assess the threat to life posed by cuts to UK humanitarian aid, and on their compatibility with our obligations under international law. It is a well-established principle contained in the Geneva conventions, most clearly stated in Articles 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, that deliberate deprivation of access to food, medicine and humanitarian aid for a civilian population represents a crime against humanity. But what if this failure to facilitate the humanitarian aid, medicine and food for a starving population was a result of cutting the budgets of emergency aid providers?
Of course, there is absolutely no legal or moral equivalence between the two actions. They different profoundly in terms of intent and jurisdiction, but they differ less in terms of effect. From the perspective of the child in need or the mother who is a refugee, it matters not whether the access to the food and medicine essential to life was denied to them as a result of a warlord with a gun or an official with a pen—the impact for them both is the same.
Tom Fletcher, the outstanding emergency relief co-ordinator at the UN, has warned of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, with 87 million lives at risk this year. That is more than the total deaths in World War II. Who is defending their legal right to life? Who is intervening to stop this hidden atrocity? What happened to the responsibility to protect?
Over the next 18 months, UK aid will be cut by £6.5 billion to £9.2 billion. At a time when the humanitarian need has never been greater this century, our contribution to alleviating that suffering has never been lower this century. UK contributions to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and to the World Food Programme have already been reduced.
An in-depth study published in the Lancet last year forecast 14 million additional deaths by 2030 as a result of the USAID cuts alone, 4.5 million of them young children. Applying that same methodology to the proposed UK aid cuts would mean an additional 3.69 million deaths by 2030, and 1.18 million of those would be children. Who speaks for them? What do Articles 6 and 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child mean for them? What do they do for them?
The Government cannot claim that they are unaware of the effects of these cuts. Their own equality impact assessments of the reductions in ODA, published last year, warned them of the risks to life in cuts to health spending.
On Saturday I had the great privilege of joining more than 2,000 others at Methodist Central Hall to mark the 80th anniversary of the first meeting of the UN General Assembly. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, the Attorney-General, spoke passionately for the Government about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and reminded us that
“every person, by virtue of their humanity, has protected universal rights”.
But rights do not feed the hungry and heal the sick unless we uphold them and apply them as a measure of our actions too.
My request to the Minister this evening is this: before the revised allocations in the aid budget are implemented for the next financial year, will she ask the Attorney-General to review them to ensure that they are fully compatible with our responsibilities to protect those most in need in our world and our obligations under international law, which we have done so much in this country over the past 80 years to shape and uphold? If she does, perhaps we may rediscover the philosophy of human solidarity of which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, reminded us at the beginning of this debate.