Human Rights (Eritrea)

Debate between Matthew Pennycook and Patrick Grady

Monday 9th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

I am pleased that time has been found to debate this important and, sadly, overlooked issue and I thank the Minister for coming to the House to respond at the end of what I know has been a long day.

Until recently, like most of my constituents and most fellow Britons, I knew little of Eritrea, its people or its Government. Conditions in the country were brought to my attention a little over a year ago by one of my constituents, Habte Hagos, who owns and runs the award-winning Blue Nile restaurant in Woolwich, among other ventures. Like many Eritreans, Habte lost family members in the struggle for a free, democratic Eritrea and he has worked over many years to raise awareness about human rights violations in his homeland. I am delighted that Habte and others are in the Gallery this evening to watch the proceedings.

Desperate human beings are moving across our continent on a scale not seen since the second world war. As we know, a significant proportion are fleeing civil war and sectarian violence in Syria, but large numbers of Eritreans are also leaving the land of their birth in the horn of Africa. An estimated 5,000 people leave Eritrea every month and almost as many men, women and children left that country last year as fled from Syria. This human exodus is all the more staggering when we consider that it is from a country of just 6 million people that is not presently at war.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing such an important debate. I have a number of Eritrean constituents who will welcome the fact that it is taking place. I acknowledge that a Foreign Office Minister will be responding to it, but a number of my constituents are concerned about the country guidance that the Home Office uses to determine whether asylum should be granted. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that guidance should be updated to take into account the findings of the recent report from the United Nations commission of inquiry on human rights in Eritrea, rather than the discredited report from the Danish Government on the same subject?

[Matthew Pennycook]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The methodology of the Danish Government’s report has been questioned. It remains the basis for the Danish Government’s guidance, but our Government should continue to review our own guidance to ensure that we are not refusing asylum to people who are genuinely being persecuted.

Most Eritreans who flee end up in neighbouring countries such as Sudan and Ethiopia, but many make the dangerous trek north towards the Maghreb and the Sinai peninsula in the hope of finding sanctuary in Europe. In doing so, each must evade: capture by their own security forces, who operate a shoot-to-kill policy against those leaving without permission; violence and extortion at the hands of desert gangs; death from dehydration in the Sahara; detention in Libya or Israel; and the lethal risks of crossing the Mediterranean. What dread leads so many, not just adults, but thousands of unaccompanied minors, to risk everything to leave their homeland behind? Words such as “tyranny”, “oppression” and “cruelty” are regularly used to describe conditions within all manner of distasteful regimes across the globe, to the point where sometimes they risk becoming stale with overuse. Yet if anything, those words fall short when applied to Eritrea under the rule of President Isaias Afwerki.

Isaias’s Eritrea is regularly described as “Africa’s North Korea”. That is a hackneyed phrase but in this instance the comparison is pardonable, because ruthless repression is the norm for those living under the rule of this isolated, hermetic and authoritarian regime. It is a far cry from what so many Eritreans fought for, heroically and for decades, and from the hopes of those who supported the struggle for liberation. Instead of democracy and the rule of law, Eritreans are ruled by a culture of fear and absolute obedience: fear that they or their classmates will be sent to carry out national service in a remote location for an unknown number of years; fear that a trusted co-worker who yesterday openly expressed an opinion may not turn up at work tomorrow; fear that a friend arrested arbitrarily will be incarcerated in a vastly overcrowded metal container or a simple hole dug in the desert ground, with little prospect of release; and fear that a disappeared family member might never be seen again.

There have been no elections since 1993, and no independent press since a Government clampdown in 2001. We have seen the pervasive and ongoing restriction of all freedoms—movement, expression and association. People have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, with no fair trials or no trials at all; indefinite compulsory military conscription; forced labour; and torture, including widespread sexual violence against women and girls. That is the situation in Eritrea today.

An extensive and detailed report published in June by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights describes, in horrifying detail, a siege state where control is absolute and where

“systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations”

are being committed. It says that these violations

“may constitute crimes against humanity”.

The crimes taking place today in Eritrea add themselves to old, but not forgotten, and still raw, abuses. Politicians, journalists, faith leaders and business owners who once proudly set out to build a prosperous post-independence future for their country instead find themselves languishing in one of the country’s numerous detention centres—or they have died there, suffering like thousands of ordinary citizens punished for refusing an order, being a member of the wrong religious domination or expressing sympathy with the wrong person.