Operation Sophia: A Failed Mission (EUC Report)

Lord Jay of Ewelme Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, who has made clear just how much we are talking about a human tragedy as much as a European Union policy. I speak as chairman of the EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee, which deals with migration, which is deeply relevant to the work of Operation Sophia. I am glad that we are discussing Operation Sophia for the second time. It is absolutely right that we should be doing so, because the issues with which it deals are so important. It really is an extremely important attempt to deal with an almost insurmountable problem—one of the most difficult and, I fear, long-lasting problems that the world faces at the moment—that of migration.

Like others, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, and her committee on the report and on the speed with which they introduced it. I take issue with only one point, and that is the title. In one sense, Operation Sophia is a failure, because it did not succeed in what it was trying to do; but it could not succeed in what it was trying to do because the issue that it faced has just been, and remains, too difficult for an operation of this kind to sort out on its own.

I mentioned one task, but in fact there are two separate but intertwined tasks and issues here. There is migration driven by conflict and utter deprivation, people forced to leave their countries because it is not safe to stay, and there is economic migration, driven by people, understandably, looking for a better life, and attracted by the richer countries of the West. I accept that those are not easily separable but they can be separated, at least intellectually, and in deciding on the right approach we need to treat them, if we can, as separate issues.

The nature of the problem with which we are dealing is shifting, too. The numbers of migrants have declined sharply over the last few years, and I welcome that. They have declined sharply from the high figures of 2015, which were very much in our minds when we last looked at this issue. The sources of migrants are changing, too. As the Commission made clear in its recent report, the main nationalities so far this year are, in descending order, Eritrean, Tunisian and Nigerian. Last year they were also, in descending order, Nigerian, Guinean and Ivorian. They will continue to change. To take one example, if the new Government in Ethiopia continue to try to defuse the long-standing tension with Eritrea, we may find that the number of Eritreans declines, too.

But those shifting numbers and shifting source countries will not make the issue go away. For different reasons, there will be a constant pressure for migration, and there will be ruthless, well-organised and highly efficient criminal gangs exploiting the vulnerability of others and looking for—and, I fear, identifying—the weak links on the north African coast to exploit, too. There is no easy, obvious way to combat this—frankly, it is idle to pretend that there is. Operation Sophia has perhaps not succeeded but, as I said earlier, nor could it. But it was right to try and it was right for the UK to support it with naval assets. Although I accept the criticism in the report of the form of the naval assets that were used, I hope that, in future, when taking part in this kind of organisation, we will do better.

For the longer term, the solutions are I think much as they seemed when we debated this issue two years ago. We—by which I mean the UK, the EU and others—must continue to work for stability in the Middle East and north Africa, difficult though that is. We must also continue, particularly through DfID, to work for economic development in sub-Saharan Africa—I very much agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, said earlier in the debate on that point. I know it is difficult, but we must, as I suggested when we last debated this and suggest again now, try to establish safe havens in refugee camps in north Africa, working through and with the United Nations—that is a crucial part of this—where sufficient political stability exists. I would be grateful if the Minister could say whether that looks feasible at the moment, and how the EU’s proposed CSDP mission to create a degree of stability in Libya, for example, is progressing.

We must try, hard though it is, to distinguish between genuine refugees and economic migrants, to return economic migrants to their home countries and to provide legal routes to permanent safety for genuine refugees—and we must treat genuine refugees with the generosity and humanity shown, for example, in the last many years by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who I know is speaking later in the debate. None of this is easy, and much of it is controversial. None of it can be done quickly, and it can be done only by countries working together.

Like others who have spoken today, I do not think that the Italian Government were right to ban the migrant ship “Aquarius”, and I rather share President Macron’s view of that. I applaud the Spanish Government’s response in saying that the migrants would be welcome in Valencia—though I have to say that, at the back of my mind, there is the feeling “What would the reaction have been here if ships with this number of people had tried to land migrants on the south coast of Britain?”. I think we have to be careful not to be too complacent about our view of others faced with difficulties such as these.

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way; I am listening to his speech with great interest. Can he tell the House what his view is of the Australian system, under which migrants are turned back—though with the necessary fuel, water and so forth—to the places from which they originated?

[Lord Jay of Ewelme]

I do not think it is right to turn people back in those conditions unless one is absolutely certain that where they are going back to is a suitable place. That is why I think the idea, and it is only an idea, of some kind of UN-sponsored camps in, say, north Africa, where economic migrants—not refugees—could be turned back to is worth exploring.

The response of the Italian Government and the reaction of the Spanish Government show only that the European response to migration as a whole is increasingly fractious, and I very much regret that. The only possible response to a crisis as serious as the migration crisis today is working together, in or outside the European Union. As the Spanish Foreign Minister said yesterday:

“This is a shared problem and it has to be treated as a shared problem”.


Sir Alan Duncan said in his reply to the report that we are debating:

“Although we are leaving the EU, we continue to cooperate with European partners, including through Op SOPHIA, on these shared challenges”.


That is a welcome statement as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough of course. Perhaps the most important question to ask the Minister this evening is whether she can confirm that we shall continue to work with our European partners through and indeed after the proposed transition or implementation period, for only by such co-operation, in our own interest, can we hope to solve the problems which Operation Sophia has tried, nobly, to solve.