Piracy

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, first, I thank those noble Lords who have said kind words about the report of EU Sub-Committee C, which I am privileged to chair, Turning the Tide on Piracy. This is an important subject around which we feel there have been a number of success stories. It may be worth mentioning some of those. Apart from the reduction in the amount of piracy, it is often forgotten that Atalanta was primarily set up for two other reasons. One was to protect the World Food Programme in distributing very important emergency aid to Somalia and, in that instance, there have been no incidents at all of piracy being successful. The second is that it is an area in which Britain has been very successful in leading a European operation—Operation Atalanta is based out of Northwood and has been a very successful operation, headed by a British admiral, showing that Britain can be very successful within a European operation.

Thirdly, it is also an area in which international co-operation on the high seas has perhaps not been recognised enough. We have players here who do not often get involved in this type of operation—China, India and the Russian Federation, as well as NATO and the European Union. The fact is that these operations and these various nationalities have, after some initial caution, operated very successfully together—international co-operation not always reflected elsewhere, particularly, ironically, between the EU and NATO, where operational co-ordination has managed to work practically very well indeed.

There are a couple of other lessons that need to be learnt. One area that came to light when we undertook our inquiry around Somali piracy was what the Somalis themselves feel about these operations. I am not an expert in that area, but one thing that has to be taken into account is that one of the reasons that Atalanta was formed—part of its mission, long forgotten—was to protect fishing grounds from what are often European predator fleets taking out some of the economic ability of Somali coastal populations to make a living. That area has not been fulfilled by any of those international operations, as I understand it, and this is an area in which there has to be a balancing factor for the local population.

Another area which is a greater success now, but was not so when it started, is the inability not of the UK shipping industry but of much of the international shipping industry to take any notice at all of recommendations by Atalanta and other operations based in the Middle East to help merchant vessels avoid piracy. A lot of this was just ignored and most of the vessels that were taken captive and their crews held for ransom were those that ignored these rules. The sub-committee felt that the insurance industry in particular did not in any way help at that time to add greater caution and make sure that these guidelines were adhered to. I believe that that has got better, but I would be very interested to hear from my noble friend the Minister as to what further discussions there have been with insurers and merchant fleets to make sure that that discipline is much better than it was.

One thing we were very sure about was that without solving Somalia’s problems onshore, as soon as Atalanta and the other naval operations went away piracy would return to the levels that were there before. We welcome the EU initiative to have a much more holistic policy toward Somalia and the EUCAP Nestor operation, which is trying to build up the coastguard ability and the rule of law of those coastal areas, is important in that. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for bringing forward this debate; there are some really good lessons to be learned, but at the moment, as soon as those operations disappear, piracy will return.