Intelligence and Security Committee Report

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

As my noble friend made clear, and as I have repeated today, this is a sensitive report. It is important that it goes through the full process. That is exactly what is taking place, in accordance with legislation. The Prime Minister will respond accordingly. I shall not add any other comment to those I have already made.

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, I am sure the report may well be sensitive but, as I understand it from the exchanges in this House yesterday, all the relevant security agencies have already given their approval for publication. Why does the Prime Minister not have confidence in their judgment?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

First, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and this Government have total confidence in our agencies, which do a sterling job in keeping us safe. According to law, however, it is not for those agencies to comment. The Prime Minister provides the final approval after taking all matters into consideration. That is the process being followed.

UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order (International Relations Committee Report)

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, as a member of the International Relations Committee I was privileged to be part of this ambitious inquiry. I pay tribute to the excellent support we had from our clerks and policy analyst. In view of the time limit, I will pass on the opportunity to comment on China, Russia, cybersecurity or the US, and will use my time to draw attention only to the two recommendations tucked away in paragraphs 354 and 355, on the importance of foreign language skills. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, referred to this issue in his opening speech and it was part of our thinking on whether the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Whitehall generally, has the skills to make it fit for purpose to shape and conduct foreign policy in the shifting world order that we described. I should declare my interests as co-chair of the All-Party Group on Modern Languages and a vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.

One of the committee’ss overarching conclusions was that:

“To maintain its influence and leadership on global issues, the UK needs a more agile, creative and entrepreneurial approach to foreign policy”.


Language skills are a perfect example of what fits that definition of agile, creative and entrepreneurial. Many recent reports from the British Academy, the British Council, the all-party group and others have stated, with increasing urgency, that in a post-Brexit world the UK will need foreign languages more than ever. But what we have is a languages crisis which risks the UK being unable to fulfil its public policy needs, notably in defence, security and diplomacy. Our committee concluded that language skills are essential for the effective conduct of diplomacy and export growth.

On the positive side, the Foreign Office language school and the Defence Centre for Languages and Culture are, to quote the British Academy’s report,

“beacons of commitment to language learning across government”.

Witnesses informed our inquiry that the diplomatic academy in the FCO has placed increasing importance on language skills and increased the proportion of posts where a foreign language is required, with a target of 80% by 2020. By contrast, the Department for International Trade told us that it had 24 designated language roles overseas but expects future free trade agreements to be negotiated in English, using professional interpreters where needed. I find that attitude from the DIT extremely worrying and a depressing illustration of the lack of awareness of the importance of language skills, and the cultural understanding that goes with them. After all, we know from research at Cardiff Business School that the UK is losing 3.5% of GDP per annum because of a lack of language skills in the workforce. Yet, astonishingly, the DIT’s new Export Strategy does not even mention language skills.

I found the Government’s response to our recommendation that there should be a cross-government language strategy, including an audit of existing language skills across Whitehall, disappointing. It simply is not good enough to point to the good work being done at the FCO, MoD, DfID and GCHQ, and assume that it will provide the co-ordination and responsibility for languages across the board. It is as much in the interests of the Treasury, the DIT and BEIS to get the message on languages as it is for the FCO. In my view, it is absolutely inadequate to assume that this is just an issue for the Department for Education to resolve. It is not just the DfE’s problem and it is unfair to expect that department to sort it all out.

One very good example of the strategic interconnectedness of languages, highly relevant to the topic of this debate, is the need to pay more attention to the 1 million or so school students in the UK who are bilingual. Children who speak languages such as Mandarin, Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Farsi and Somali at home should have their language skills recognised, developed and accredited. They should be shown how much more employable they will be as a result, whether in business, diplomacy, security or education.

The committee’s second recommendation on languages is that the Government should do more to encourage universities to restore modern language degrees in order to ensure that we produce sufficient linguists to meet the UK’s foreign and trade policy needs. The Government’s response rightly points to some of their positive and welcome initiatives in schools, designed to try to improve the supply chain to universities. These are the Mandarin Excellence Programme, the pedagogy pilot programme and the introduction of compulsory language learning in primary schools. Overall, though, I found the Government’s response on this point rather thin, lacking any sense of quite how dramatically serious the decline of languages at school and university has become. The Government set great store by the EBacc, yet the boost it has given to GCSE take-up has clearly stalled—stuck for the last three years at only 47%. In 2015, 100,000 fewer language GCSEs were taken compared to a decade earlier and A-level languages, especially German, are in freefall. No wonder over 50 of our universities have scrapped some or all of their modern language degrees. The total number of modern language graduates has declined by 54% in the last decade.

Will the Minister say whether the FCO will take a further initiative, building on the cross-Whitehall languages group, to draw in more departments and agencies? Between them, and with expert advice, they could come up with an effective mechanism for ensuring not just a cross-government talking shop but a genuinely cross-government strategy on languages, backed up by committed leadership, transparent accountability and resourcing—one which acknowledges the importance of languages and linguists for the success and resilience of the UK’s future in the world.

Attacks on Journalists

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, my particular concern is the protection, or lack of it, for interpreters and translators working alongside many journalists in conflict zones. I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.

The role of interpreters in conflict situations is vital but poorly understood and rarely acknowledged. They are unsung heroes. I am quite sure that journalists would be happy to confirm how important interpreters can be for them, just as members of the Armed Forces have been fulsome in their praise for the interpreters working with them in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. However, it is not sufficient to classify interpreters as “media workers” or “media professionals”, as they have been under various UN resolutions on the safety of journalists. On the contrary, subsuming professional civilian interpreters within the media generally has added to their invisibility and lack of status. Neither can they rely on the Geneva conventions for their protection, whether during or after a conflict, because they are simply not ordinary civilians any more than journalists are.

When foreign correspondents leave a conflict zone, the local interpreters are left to fend for themselves. Although we have some statistics on the appalling level of violence towards journalists, the vulnerability of interpreters, on whom many journalists would be the first to admit they depend, is undocumented. Interpreters are often the victims of distrust, discrimination and threats from all sides. Indeed, there is even a syndrome known as the translator-traitor mentality—in other words, the assumption that the local civilian translator or interpreter is not doing a neutral, professional job but must be working for the other side, whoever that happens to be.

I pay tribute to the work of Red T, an international NGO based in New York that monitors incidents involving the translator-traitor mentality. In 2012, it produced the first ever conflict zone field guide for linguists and users of their services. Some of the guidance is about very small details but ones that can make all the difference as to whether an interpreter is wrongly perceived. For example, users, including journalists, are asked to be aware of how they position themselves physically, making sure that eye contact is between the two parties and not with the interpreter, which might give rise to suspicions about impartiality.

Red T has also called for a UN resolution conferring special legal status on interpreters in conflict zones, similar to Resolutions 1738 and 2222 about journalists and the media and their safety. The Minister has been kind enough to discuss this issue with me before and to facilitate contact between Red T and our ambassador at the UN. I am very grateful for his interest and concern, but I ask him now whether he will undertake to raise the profile of this issue and give it greater momentum by adding the support of Her Majesty’s Government to that of other countries—so far, Sweden, Spain and Belarus—in calling for a Security Council resolution along the lines I have mentioned. I believe that the UK is currently the penholder at the UN for the protection of civilians, so, in my opinion, it would be an excellent example of leadership to take this issue forward.

I do not wish for one minute to deny or undermine in any way the vulnerability of journalists we have heard about, and I fully support the call for stronger measures to increase their safety and protection. However, I urge the Government—and, indeed, the media as it reports and comments on this whole issue—also to acknowledge the vulnerable position of local interpreters and to make common cause with them. As George Packer of the New Yorker magazine said about foreign correspondents and interpreters:

“Both are considered spies, but one is only an infidel, while the other is something worse—an apostate, a traitor”.


I would like to give three examples to illustrate that. In 2006, the journalist Jill Carroll was abducted in Baghdad, together with her Iraqi interpreter, Allan Enwiyah. Carroll was released physically unharmed after nearly three months, while the interpreter was found dead with two bullets in his head. In the same year, Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo and his interpreter were captured in Afghanistan. Mastrogiacomo was rescued in a deal that swapped him for imprisoned Taliban. The interpreter was beheaded. In 2015, Mohammed Ismael Rasool, an Iraqi interpreter, was kidnapped along with two British journalists who were working on a story about clashes between Kurdish youth and the Turkish security forces. The journalists were released after six days, but the interpreter spent over four months in prison and was freed on bail only because media and human rights organisations campaigned forcefully for his freedom and his life.

I hope that the Minister will reassure me that he is willing to inject a greater sense of urgency into the call for a Security Council resolution. I would also be grateful if he would agree to meet Red T the next time he is in New York on ministerial business at the UN. Finally, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, for tabling this debate and for giving me the opportunity to raise these important issues.

Yemen: Giving Peace a Chance (International Relations Committee Report)

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Monday 1st April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, I too am a member of the International Relations Committee and am grateful that we have been given the opportunity to debate this report so soon after its publication, given the urgency and extreme seriousness of the situation in Yemen.

I shall focus on just two issues. As the first is the position of women, I have just deleted several parts of my speech, not to repeat the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, with which I wholeheartedly agree. We know from various sources that women and children are, not surprisingly, bearing the brunt of the violence and its consequences, including starvation and the lack of healthcare. For example, the International Rescue Committee reports that over a million women who are pregnant or breastfeeding are currently acutely malnourished. The UN has warned that the maternal death rate is likely to be double what it was in 2015.

Against this appalling background, the committee’s report was able to record some impressive aid programmes being delivered by DfID; it goes without saying that these are more than welcome. For example, last September, Her Majesty’s Government announced that almost £100 million would fund a nutrition programme, treating 70,000 children with acute malnutrition and providing antenatal care to 800,000 women.

I do not, however, want to focus on women solely in relation to their suffering in the conflict. I also wish to stress how important it is that women form an integral part of the peace process to resolve that conflict—an issue also raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Amos and Lady Anelay.

In a recent Written Question, I asked what action Her Majesty’s Government have taken, or plan to take, to ensure that the provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on the involvement of women in peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction are being fully complied with in the Stockholm agreement process aimed at ending the war in Yemen. The Minister provided an encouraging Answer, saying that the UK has indeed lobbied the parties in the conflict to include more women in formal peace talks and explained why—although, in the light of the observations of the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, we should perhaps be talking not about more women but about any women at all.

In addition, he pointed out that, through the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, the UK helps to support the Yemeni Women’s Pact for Peace and Security. I thank the Minister for this information. Can he update the House on any progress being made by Tawafaq, the Yemeni women’s pact, especially in the light of the championing of its work by the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Yemen?

Looking at other ways of increasing—or perhaps I should say achieving—the participation of women in peace talks, I draw the Minister’s attention to the meeting a few weeks ago which members of the International Relations Committee held with the president and other members of the Southern Transitional Council of Yemen. He will know that the STC is currently excluded from the Stockholm process and I appreciate that there are dilemmas to be addressed. At the same time, it was clear that the STC has an inclusive attitude towards women and at its 2017 assembly agreed an explicit policy on women’s rights. So can the Minister tell us the Government’s current view on including the STC in official peace talks, with specific reference to the inclusion of women?

The second issue I want to raise, like most other noble Lords in this debate, is that of arms sales by the UK to Saudi Arabia. As others have said, we concluded in our report that we disagreed with the Government’s view that the UK was,

“narrowly on the right side of international humanitarian law”,

to quote the former Foreign Secretary. We also concluded that UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia are,

“highly likely to be the cause of significant civilian casualties in Yemen”.

Since the report was published, further doubt still has been directed at Her Majesty’s Government in this regard. The international NGO Saferworld has argued that the UK’s assistance to Saudi Arabia in targeting strikes is potentially leading to more, not fewer, casualties, and that the UK is guilty of a lack of transparency in how decisions on arms licences are made, putting the UK out of line with several other European countries, which, as we have heard, now have a de facto embargo on arms sales to Saudi.

Does the Minister still stand by the Government’s position that they are on the right side of international humanitarian law in this case? Secondly, echoing the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, will the Minister clarify how political approval for arms licences is reached? I look forward to his reply to my questions and those of other noble Lords.

UK and the Western Balkans (IRC Report)

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, it is my privilege to serve on the International Relations Committee and to have been part of the inquiry that produced this report, including visiting Kosovo and Macedonia. I place on record my sincere thanks to the clerk, the policy analyst and the special adviser, who were all invaluable in helping to shape and steer our work.

I want to focus on what the report concludes about the role of civil society in helping to achieve and sustain stability across the region and within individual countries, and also on the role that the UK can play in enabling that.

The importance of civil society, in the form of the many NGOs with which we met and about whose work we heard, emerged very strongly in our meetings and evidence sessions, and related in particular to young people and to women. What also came across strongly was how much the UK’s role was welcomed and valued, especially in providing technical support and training to help improve a whole range of objectives essential to a post-conflict society, including the rule of law, through training for the police and the judiciary, anti-corruption, the participation of women in public life, and in education.

One example was the meeting we held in Pristina with the Kosovo Women’s Network and the Kosova Rehabilitation Centre for Torture Victims. It was striking that both these NGOs represent the interests of all ethnic groups, and that is one reason why NGOs are often so important: they straddle boundaries and obstacles which still impede progress by political parties and traditional structures. In the case of the KWN and the KRCT, the focus is on justice for and the needs of survivors of sexual violence during the war in Kosovo, including domestic violence, and the treatment and rehabilitation of torture victims. They were keen above all that we should understand the frustration they felt about the enormous volume of evidence of cases of sexual violence which is currently held by EULEX—“a Pandora’s box of testimony”, they called it—and which should be bringing perpetrators to justice and some kind of closure for the victims, but on which action is blocked because Kosovo is not recognised by some EU member states, as we have heard. They asked that the UK should facilitate the transfer of this body of testimony to the United Nations, where it might be safeguarded and stand a better chance of being acted on. There was clear recognition that the UK had a particularly credible reputation on this issue, as well as on domestic violence because of our PSVI initiative, and that we could also be expected to offer concrete help in the form of training for judges and other court officials on dealing with violence against women. What specific action is being or can be taken to follow this up and build on our excellent PSVI work in this region, following the review of EULEX?

Similarly, in Macedonia we met representatives of the La Strada programme, where the NGO Open Gate works to combat the trafficking of women—or, in fact, as we learned, mostly children, as the majority of victims are girls under 18 being trafficked for prostitution. We were told that there was a lack of understanding of international human rights standards and case law in this area and, again, that training and support to help to improve the knowledge and skills of relevant professionals would be helpful and could be provided by the UK. Could the Minister say what funding and other kinds of assistance are being provided to Open Gate? Will the Minister undertake to ensure, as the report recommends, that the programme for the western Balkans summit in July in the UK will explicitly include support for, and the involvement of, NGOs and civil society, very much in the same way as was done recently as part of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting? More than just including NGOs in a fringe event, I mean really using them to shape and participate in the mainstream agenda.

As far as young people are concerned, we found that the overriding question is whether they can be persuaded to remain in the region or whether they will seek a better and more prosperous life and opportunities elsewhere. The obvious argument was that a more resilient economy would be a decisive factor in creating the conditions in which young people were more likely to stay, so British investment and trade, currently at a relatively low level, was heartily encouraged. In Macedonia, the Deputy Prime Minister stressed the priority of achieving NATO membership as the key factor that he thought would lead to greater economic investment. I also endorse the need, already expressed by my noble friend Lord Hannay, for Her Majesty’s Government to support and assist in any way that they can the case for NATO membership for Macedonia.

We met the National Youth Council of Macedonia, which represents the interests of 15 to 29 year-olds and has good links with the British Youth Council. Its members were strongly committed to remaining in their country, but we met others in Kosovo aged 13 to 17 who did not have strong identification with Kosovo as an independent state, describing and defining themselves either as Albanians or as Serbs but not as Kosovans, and almost all with the vision of leaving to study, work and live elsewhere.

Across the region, though, we saw how important it is for the UK to continue to engage in improving educational opportunities for young people, and the soft power value of investing in training for future leaders—for example, by expanding the Chevening scholarships and encouraging students from the western Balkans to come to the UK for higher education. In this context, even though I appreciate that the Minister is speaking today for the FCO, I ask him if he will undertake to speak to his colleagues in the Home Office on the issue of students and immigration figures. Once again, as your Lordships have found in several other reports from Select Committees, this came up loud and clear in this inquiry too. The Government’s response to the report is regrettably silent on the issue. We recommend that international students should not be treated as economic migrants; it is unnecessary and self-defeating, whether in relation to the western Balkans or anywhere else.

In conclusion, I emphasise the importance of maintaining and deepening the UK’s engagement in the region, and doing so irrespective of our membership or otherwise of the EU. There are many ways in which our historic involvement and our skill set as a nation can offer a positive, even unique, contribution to developing democracy and stability in the region, in our mutual interests.

Middle East (IRC Report)

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Tuesday 4th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, I have the privilege to serve on the International Relations Committee and to have been part of the inquiry into the Middle East. I echo the grateful thanks we owe to our clerks and policy analysts for their superb support.

The first point I would like to make is about our methodology. We were conscious that, in the region of our inquiry, young people between 15 and 24 make up more than one-quarter of the population, and in some countries this figure is even higher: for example, in Jordan 70% of the population are under 30. The young tend to be excluded from formal political processes, but they are well-informed and connected by technology, not only within their own country but globally, and so have become increasingly activist and questioning. We were keen to reflect the views of young people from the Middle East in our evidence. The views of the usual suspects, if I may respectfully refer to them like that—current and former ambassadors, Ministers, senior civil servants, diplomats and professors—are, of course, absolutely vital, but that was not going to give us the inside story of what young people think.

Our round table, attended by 19 young people from 14 countries, was both enlightening and innovative. Their views surprised us on some issues, reassured us on others and certainly gave us some ideas and perspectives that we could not possibly have heard from anywhere else. A great summary of what they said they welcomed as positive British social and cultural influences was: the BBC World Service; Premier League football; and Monty Python. I suggest that this form of consultation with young people might be a standard feature of methodology for all Select Committee inquiries to consider, whatever the topic.

Two prominent themes to emerge from our discussions with the young people are important threads throughout the report: stability and soft power. I want to make a few brief comments on these, in particular on the role which language skills play both in promoting stability and exercising soft power.

A core conclusion we reached was that the priority for British policy should be to encourage efforts at stabilising the region. A number of witnesses, including some of the young people, told us that they would choose stability over democracy any day. It was clear to us that one of the most effective drivers of stability across the region is support for the expansion of educational opportunities and educational reform, and the UK has a crucial role in this.

We are talking about education in the countries concerned as well as creating more opportunities for young people from the region to come to the UK to study. On the former, the British Council is already playing a huge and constructive role, with a presence in 17 countries in the MENA region and 1,600 staff. Its work is not only in teaching English but in programmes which promote various skills of public life, such as debating and social activism. One British Council initiative has delivered 100 social action projects since 2011 among the displaced Syrian community, spanning education for children, community peacebuilding and women’s economic empowerment.

On the other side of the educational coin, the report also recommends that the UK should continue to encourage young people from the region to study in the UK, which will increase our influence among future leaders and decision-makers. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said, we strongly agree with other reports to your Lordships’ House stating that the UK Government should stop treating students as economic migrants and remove them from calculations of immigration figures. It is extremely disappointing to see that the Government response continues to resist this recommendation.

But education cuts both ways, and our inquiry also revealed something of a skills deficit in the UK as far as the Arabic language is concerned. Speaking another language is not just about mastering grammar and vocabulary but brings with it the cultural understanding which promotes greater facility in diplomacy, trade, security and community cohesion. It is a myth that everyone speaks English. Even though speaking English is almost always an advantage in today’s world, speaking only English is a huge disadvantage. Arabic is the fastest-growing language on the internet and social media. We are fortunate that the BBC World Service is expanding its reach in the MENA region. In its evidence to our inquiry, it told us of its investment in the Arabic service’s digital offer and plans to strengthen existing TV and radio output.

However, our witnesses from both the World Service and the British Council pointed to the deficit of Arabic speakers in the UK. Despite the need for speakers of Arabic, and indeed of Farsi, for access to the region, this remains a need insufficiently supported by Her Majesty’s Government. This is very short-sighted, as a British Council analysis found that Arabic is important for the needs of export growth and future trade relations, as well as for security and influence. It also said that the learning of Arabic was about British young people being more,

“internationally mobile, open and curious to the world”.

Yet, the head of Arabic services at the World Service told us that its attempts to recruit Arabists, or Arabic speakers, in the UK usually come to nothing. Indeed, it is shocking that Arabic is offered at degree level at only 15 UK universities out of 167. Somewhat surprisingly, the learning of Arabic has increased in schools, but these are overwhelmingly those belonging to the Association of Muslim Schools, which are faith schools, and the Arabic being taught is more likely to be the classical Arabic of the Koran than modern standard Arabic, which is taught in only a handful of mainstream state schools, often as an extra-curricular subject. Just for the record, and in case our report should confuse or be misinterpreted, I must point out a misprint in paragraph 396, where the words “Modern Standard Arabic” are misplaced and look as if they refer to the classical Arabic of the Koran rather than the Arabic being taught in mainstream schools. Of course, MSA and classical Arabic are not the same thing.

The report recommends that the Government should invest in a long-term plan to increase the UK’s expertise and proficiency in Arabic. There is a good model for this in the existing £10 million a year partnership between the Government and the British Council with the Mandarin Excellence Programme. However, the Government response says that this is not on the cards for Arabic because Arabic, unlike Mandarin, is not sufficiently established in schools. Surely that is a circular argument: the Government appear to be saying that they will not invest in boosting Arabic because it is too weak in schools; it is weak in schools because it is not getting enough government support. Is the Minister prepared to reconsider the Government’s position on this and come up with something similar for Arabic, including an equivalent level of financial investment in what is clearly in Britain’s long-term interests?