Human Rights

Ann Clwyd Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell, although I suspect it is a case of poacher turned gamekeeper. You are normally on the Foreign Affairs Committee along with us, and I am sure that you would have made a contribution to this debate if you were not chairing it.

I acknowledge the importance of the annual report, which was an initiative of the previous Government. I am glad that this Government have carried it on. As chair of the all-party group on human rights, I must say that the report provides a useful tool by which to understand the FCO’s stated positions on particular issues, as well as for parliamentarians and civil society to challenge and measure the Government against those ambitions and principles.

I welcome the FCO’s initiative to release quarterly electronic updates on the countries of concern listed in the report. However, it is critical that the report continues to be annual and comprehensive and that it is released publicly in a paper format. I agree with others: it is a pity that a debate of this kind is being squeezed into a very short period. Such a debate should be held on the Floor of the House, not in Westminster Hall.

The Foreign Secretary states in his foreword to the 2010 report that human rights are part of the FCO’s “irreducible core” and that the promotion of human rights is

“indivisible from our foreign policy objectives”.

Those are very worthy statements and, of course, I welcome them. In April last year, I sent a written question to the FCO seeking to ascertain the number of identifiable human rights officers posted to British embassies and missions overseas, which is a perfectly reasonable question to ask. The Government say that they support human rights as a general principle, and I am sure they would acknowledge the importance of bilateral defence relations and country-to-country trade. British embassies around the world have identifiable personnel who are responsible for ensuring that British positions on defence, trade and investment are heard and, we hope, acted upon. It seems to be perfectly reasonable, therefore, to ask how many human rights officers operate and in which countries.

In the response—not from this Minister; it was on a particularly busy day—the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for North West Norfolk (Mr Bellingham), said that all staff at all locations had human rights as a top priority and that

“For operational and security reasons we cannot give further details of staff deployments and activity levels”.

I asked that question again when the FCO Minister responsible for human rights appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and I was given a similarly implausible answer. I say implausible because, in answer to a written question in the other place on 8 November 2010 about the number of military attachés deployed in British embassies overseas, the Government were able to give a detailed list of attachés in individual embassies in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, including the distribution by rank.

Today, the Committee received a letter from the Foreign Secretary in which he, again, does not answer the question. He obscures the issue by raising security and operational concerns, so I still have not got an answer. However, he did promise to come back to the Committee with an estimate of the scale of resources devoted to human rights work across the network. I look forward to that and hope it will be more enlightening than the answers that I have received from FCO Ministers to date. Someone with clout must be identifiably responsible for human rights—monitoring and reporting, meeting civil society and advocating British positions with academics and Government officials, gathering data on the ground and producing expert information on political, social, economic and legislative developments that have worrying consequences for human rights in a given trouble spot. That is precisely the kind of human intelligence we need to understand emerging problems and, where possible, prevent them.

I should like to refer to striking the balance between trade and human rights. What the Arab spring has shown is that the UK has been much too lax in the monitoring of the sales of arms and dual-use equipment to Governments in the middle east and elsewhere. That applies to the previous Government as much as it does to this one. Although we have applauded popular calls for democracy in the middle east, we have frequently seen those calls answered with British-made weaponry and surveillance equipment. The licensing of a wide variety of weaponry and components to countries such as Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen has been misguided. Licences must be rejected when there is a substantial risk of arms being used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international human rights or humanitarian law.

Let us consider, for example, the case of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Through summer and autumn last year, very credible human rights non-governmental organisations were documenting severe human rights abuses by the Bahraini security services—those allegations have since been backed up by the King-appointed independent commission of inquiry—and Saudi troops were being sent into Bahrain. Yet in September last year, both the Bahraini and Saudi authorities were invited to attend the Defence and Security Equipment International arms fair here in London. For those of us concerned by human rights and the momentum of the Arab spring, it seemed completely absurd for our Government at one moment to wring their hands over the situation in Bahrain and say that they were doing all they could, while simultaneously the self-same Government were invited to London and encouraged to buy more weaponry. How can the Government be regarded as credible among civil society and the populations of the middle east when they seem intent on undermining that credibility with those kind of inconsistencies?

On a matter related to human rights credibility and the arms fair that I mentioned a moment ago, I serve on the Committees on Arms Export Controls, which has been hearing some alarming information about the trade fair. That is important with regard to our discussions, because the former Defence Secretary, the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), gave a speech at the trade fair and said:

“defence and security exports play a key role in promoting our foreign policy objectives.”

At the same trade fair, it was discovered by campaigners that two Pakistani exhibitors were displaying promotional material for cluster munitions, which of course are banned by international law. That is not the first time that DSEI has been involved in controversy over exhibitors promoting banned equipment. Both the organisers and the Government should, by now, have a clear and robust compliance procedure to ensure that the UK is not a safe haven for the promotion of weaponry and equipment that is otherwise banned. It should not be left to NGOs and activists to police events that a Defence Secretary endorses as having a key role in promoting our foreign policy objectives. [Interruption.] I am recovering from flu, Mr Rosindell, and getting a bit croaky, so I shall wind-up quickly.

I urge the Government to reassert their diplomatic influence at the UN in 2012 to press for a comprehensive global arms trade treaty that will have a genuine impact on poverty and armed conflict in some of the most fragile societies. In recent evidence provided to the Committees on Arms Export Controls, the UK working group on arms—a coalition of NGOs, including Amnesty and Oxfam—told us that

“other supportive states (including major UK allies) have been telling us at the UN that their impression is that the UK has ‘rolled back’ in its leadership and activity on the ATT. Comments tend to focus on UK interventions at the ATT being notably much less substantial than in previous years, a reduction of political profile, and an absence of senior official activity”.

The Minister is vigorously shaking his head.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Alistair Burt)]

Absolutely.

[Ann Clwyd]

The working group also questioned whether the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Ministry of Defence were allocating sufficient resources to ensure a meaningful treaty. Given that the UK Government—both this one and the previous one—have pressed so hard for a global comprehensive arms trade treaty, would not it be a monumental defeat for British diplomacy if we failed to engage all our resources at the last hurdle and ended up with a weak, ineffective treaty?

The examples that I have given do not suggest that the Government are neglecting human rights; it would not be fair to say that. Excellent work is being done both here in London and in embassies around the world. The Government need to consider whether all their actions genuinely reflect the statements that they make on the importance of human rights and whether we sometimes undermine the excellent work done on the ground by FCO staff.

Can we welcome Bahraini princes to Downing street and be taken seriously when we say that we are deeply concerned about human rights there? Are we undermining our position on the global arms trade by not setting the highest standards for Government-endorsed arms trade fairs?

Human rights are not just for the FCO; they must be reflected in the work of the Department for International Development, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and, not least, in Downing street. I urge the FCO to work with those other arms of government to establish how they can ensure that human rights are not placed in a box at the FCO. I suggest that the FCO deliver a report next year that takes into account all the Government’s external relations activities, including those beyond the FCO, so that we can judge the efforts of the whole Government, not just one of their arms, in furthering the cause of international human rights.