United Nations General Assembly 2018: IRC Report

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, as a member of the International Relations Committee and as someone who started her career working for the United Nations Association in the UK, I was pleased to have been part in producing this short report and to have had the opportunity to hear from Mr Hochschild, whose oral evidence to the committee was extremely valuable. As ever, thanks are also due to our excellent clerks and policy analyst.

I will briefly flag up four issues which I hope Her Majesty’s Government will agree to champion at this month’s UN General Assembly. Before doing so, I also wish to pay tribute to the late Kofi Annan, a superb and stand-out Secretary-General, many of whose initiatives are exactly the ones we would like to see more vigorously pursued and implemented now. I also welcome the appointment of Michelle Bachelet as the next UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and look forward to debating at a future date what I hope and trust will be her achievements in that role.

In the light of her appointment, it would certainly be timely for the next General Assembly to recommit in the strongest possible terms to the UN human rights agenda and, as our report recommends, for Her Majesty’s Government to take a clear leadership position in advocating this. It was disturbing to hear from Mr Hochschild in his evidence to the committee that there had been a,

“global pushback against human rights”.

His view was that many parts of the world have seen a retreat from the protection and promotion of human rights in the face of threats of terrorism and the assertion of sovereignty. He observed that conflict is driven by exclusion, and so the links between terrorism and human rights must be acknowledged and acted upon.

The second issue on which the UK should assert some strong leadership is the reputation, authority and credibility of the UN, which Mr Hochschild described as being a “major problem”. This goes to the heart of needing to sustain and constantly articulate the case for multilateralism, which must surely be the only effective way to handle and counter the global challenges of the 21st century—I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Judd—including terrorism, climate change, unprecedented population movement and cybercrime. One important aspect of leadership in this regard will be to maintain and improve levels of funding and to persuade other member states to do likewise.

The third issue I want to raise, and which itself has a bearing on the resilience of the UN’s budget, is the view shared by Mr Hochschild and the current Secretary General that the private sector should be mobilised to play a greater part in the implementation of the sustainable development goals. This must be right, and there are already many examples of successful partnerships, for example in anti-malaria programmes and in private sector funding for translation and interpreting facilities. I would be interested to hear from the Minister how the Government envisage a greater role for the private sector might be developed, what this would look like and what the UK will advocate at the General Assembly to support it.

Finally, I ask the Minister whether Her Majesty’s Government will seek to strengthen the text of the global compact on refugees, which is being put to the General Assembly, specifically in respect of language issues—and I declare an interest as vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. The draft global compact acknowledges the importance of language education for integration but would be significantly strengthened if it provided explicitly for the right of refugees to information in a language they speak and understand so that they can access relevant protection and assistance. This right would need to be backed up by systematic data collection on language and improved resourcing for interpreting and translation, so that help for refugees can be better targeted and more effective.

I am grateful to the splendid organisation Translators without Borders for alerting me to these issues. I hope the Minister will be willing to see that they are raised at the General Assembly later this month, along with the issues flagged up in the Select Committee’s report.