Refugees: Mass Displacement

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, wish to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for introducing this debate with his usual humanity and well-informed compassion. This debate calls for an international response to the shocking fact that, globally, 84 million people are displaced. It is a misery index of record proportions. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and others documented the basis and root causes of so many of those people moving. People do not choose to leave their homes, extended families and communities unless they have very good reason.

As a human rights lawyer over many years, my work has taught me about inhumanity and the pain experienced by those at the receiving end. Like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I have visited lots of the refugee camps where the wretched of the earth are collected: Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon and the Jordan camps, where people have fled from Syria. More recently, I have gone to Erbil to take testimonies from the Yazidi women who were raped and raped, over and over again. I saw girls who, having returned to their Yazidi families, had to abandon babies who would not be accepted by their communities because they had been produced as a result of the rapes by ISIL militia.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned my recent work. My young team—there were only four of us —worked to evacuate the women judges, lawyers and journalists from Afghanistan. It is shocking that the international community failed so greatly to do something that we ended up having to do. Why should a small group of people have to think, “How are we going to get these women judges out, who are on a Taliban kill list?” It should have been nations that came together and said, “What are we going to do? How do we evacuate? Who are we going to offer places to?”

That should have been done, and this emergency should have been prepared for. However, we are seeing a retreat from internationalism, and that is the difficulty when we call for an international response, because international collaboration is basically what will do the business of responding to these horrors. I recently read a lecture given just before Christmas by David Miliband, who was the director-general of the International Rescue Committee. I recommend it to everyone. He talks about the systems failure of states, diplomacy, humanitarian response and law.

It will not surprise noble Lords that I will highlight the business about the failure of law. A number of years ago, in 2013, I was involved in the creation of a report on climate change and human rights. It became so clear that we would create a sort of cauldron of people movement if we did not act promptly to the emergency of climate change, because people would be forced to move.

David Miliband speaks to the failure of diplomacy, the failure of peacekeeping, which we heard about from others, and the reduction in peace treaties. We used to work hard at creating these, but last year there were only seven efforts to create peace in conflicted areas.

On the failure of law, we have seen a retreat from international law. When the UN was inaugurated in 1945, Clem Attlee described the UN charter as

“our first line of defence”.

He meant that it would be our first line of defence against the abuse of power and that we were, of course, reminding everyone that the rights of people and individuals who suffer, not just the rights of states, are so important. The creation of that rules-based order is now under threat. So we need more internationalism. We need to enrich internationalism if there is to be an international response.