Small Boats Incident in the Channel

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I am very happy to acknowledge that institution. I acknowledge and praise everyone who saves lives at sea. It is a very important principle to us as UK citizens that the first job of anyone at sea is to save lives at sea.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

I declare an interest, in that I am supporting an anti-human trafficking project that is supported by the Government. I will be travelling before Christmas into an affected area. I have been extensively in Sudan and in the Sahel. The Minister is absolutely right: she leads a committed team in the Home Office that is looking to address this issue at the source. She was also right, in response to my noble friend Lady Hamwee, about the international nature of trafficking and the distinct but connected crime of smuggling. However, they are not extraterritorial offences, and therefore the very nature of those offences means that it is incredibly difficult to bring forward prosecutions on an international scale. I believe that human trafficking should be a crime against humanity. Will the Minister examine this area for its extraterritorial dimension because, unless we have the ability to prosecute those networks across many countries, we will not tackle those heinous offences that she so eloquently outlined?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I am very grateful for the noble Lord’s intervention because he is absolutely right. I cannot go into a lot of detail about extraterritoriality, but I praise the NCA for its work both nationally and internationally, with Governments across the world to try to cut this off upstream before it gets to our shores.