Baroness Verma
Main Page: Baroness Verma (Conservative - Life peer)Operation Sophia: A Failed Mission (EUC Report)
Baroness Verma Excerpts
Baroness Verma
That this House takes note of the Report from the European Union Committee Operation Sophia: a failed mission (2nd Report, HL Paper 5).
Baroness Verma (Con)
My Lords, I am very pleased that we have the opportunity to debate the EU External Affairs Sub-Committee report Operation Sophia: A Failed Mission this afternoon. Today’s debate is very timely given the recent news reports we are again witnessing in the media. Operation Sophia is the EU’s naval mission in the Mediterranean. Its aim is to disrupt the business model of human smuggling as well as the trafficking networks that operate in the central Mediterranean. This report is a follow-up to our earlier report Operation Sophia, the EU’s Naval Mission in the Mediterranean: An Impossible Challenge, which was published in 2016. The follow-up report considers the progress made by Operation Sophia since then up to July 2017.
I have had the honour of serving as chair of the EU External Affairs Sub-Committee, and I extend my thanks to all members of the committee for their expertise and their valuable contributions to the report, to all those who have provided written and oral evidence to the committee, to the committee’s secretariat—Eva George, Julia Ewert, and Lauren Harvey—for their assistance with the inquiry and the preparation of this report, and to Jennifer Martin-Kohlmorgen for preparing for this debate and ably taking over as clerk to the committee.
I am sure noble Lords will recall last year’s extremely distressing scenes of migrants crammed into unseaworthy boats crossing the Mediterranean. These boats are run by people smugglers and criminal gangs and organisations. While, due to other global events, we may not have been exposed recently to the continuing trend of people attempting to cross the Mediterranean, we had a stark reminder of them this week, with the Italian Government refusing to grant a charity rescue ship crammed with 629 migrants, among them pregnant women and small children, permission to dock.
This is very much a live issue. The migrant crisis continues. The report being debated today considered the timeframe between January and July 2017, in which 84,879 irregular migrants used the Mediterranean route crossing from Libya to Italy. It is estimated that in that time 2,150 lives were lost at sea. The figure for the whole of 2017 is estimated at 2,853. We published this report in July last year to feed into the Government’s and EU member states’ discussions around the renewal of Operation Sophia’s mandate, which was due for extension on 27 July 2017. It is in this context that your Lordships’ House has to view the report. It is good to observe a perceptible reduction in the number of deaths at sea, but much more work still needs to be done to ensure disruption in trafficking networks, and it is equally important to deter the flow of migrants.
In these two areas, the report found that the mission had failed. People smuggling begins onshore, so a naval mission is the wrong tool for tackling this dangerous, inhumane and unscrupulous business. Once the boats have set sail, it is too late. That is not to say that Operation Sophia has not been a humanitarian success; it remains critical life-saving search and rescue work that needs to continue. However, it has failed to meet the stated objective of its mandate: to disrupt the business model of people smuggling. As of March 2018, Operation Sophia had apprehended 137 smugglers and neutralised 537 vessels, but witnesses confirmed to our inquiry that the people arrested,
“were mainly lower down the food chain in the criminal gangs”,
and that, while the smugglers’ business model had been impacted, it had not been broken.
All future UK and EU action must focus on tackling people smuggling in source and transit countries. Outreach work and law enforcement co-operation will also be vital. The EU’s current aims to improve development in source and transit countries are small steps in the right direction but much more work needs to be done, the results of which will be delivered over long periods of time as there is no quick fix. We must persist in providing a sustainable long-term focus. Libya, as the last stop-off point on the migration route across Mediterranean waters, has the potential to play a key role. However, in the absence of formal consent from the Libyan Government or a UN Security Council resolution, Operation Sophia has not been able to move to the next crucial steps—that is, to move into Libyan territorial waters and eventually on to Libyan soil.
As the Government have also remarked in their response to the report, the later stages have the potential to have the greatest impact against the smugglers’ business model. However, at the moment there is no expectation that the political and security conditions in Libya will improve to enable Operation Sophia to move to its next phase in the near future. It is that realisation that has prompted us to conclude that we saw little reason to renew Operation Sophia’s mandate. Having said that, it is our view that search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean are vital and must continue. The same goes for the EU’s training of the Libyan coastguard. However, Operation Sophia is not a precondition for such training to take place. It could be equally delivered outside the operations framework.
I thank the Government for their response to our report. I am pleased that they agree that we need to prioritise interventions upstream in countries of origin and transit. I invite the Minister to comment on any recent efforts that the Government have taken to engage with Libya to stem irregular migration flows either bilaterally or through the EU. The Government have told us that planning is under way for a civilian mission in Libya, focusing on the southern land border. Could the Minister provide the House with updates regarding the current state of planning for these missions?
We are very concerned about the dangerous conditions and human rights abuses that many migrants continue to face in Libya, and welcome the Government’s work in providing funding through respected NGOs and international bodies to improve those conditions and support voluntary returns from Libya. What is the Government’s assessment of the current human rights situation in Libya, and how do they see the Libyan Government working with these external bodies in monitoring the welfare of migrants? We also remain concerned about reports of human rights abuses by the Libyan coastguard. Will the Minister provide us with an update on the inclusion of specific human rights elements into the training of the coastguard? What progress is being made in monitoring any abuses committed by the Libyan coastguard?
Of course, the UK’s departure from the EU places a question mark over our future participation in common security and defence policy missions such as Operation Sophia. When does the Minister expect negotiations on the future of UK/EU relationships in the area of common foreign policy and security policy to commence? How does she see UK interests as a third country participating in these negotiations? Are the Government working on how they will continue to engage proactively and constructively with our EU partners in the forthcoming negotiations, recognising that the UK and the EU face common challenges and that these are best tackled together?
What mechanisms does my noble friend see as critical to these workings? Does she agree that it is high time that when we talk about migrants, we see them as people taking on extremely difficult, dangerous journeys for better economic opportunities? I hope that much more can be done at source and that the UK remains a world leader in demonstrating our full intention to support economic growth in some of the poorest places in the world. In recent days, the language around and references to migrants have become extremely toxic, but I hope that will start to change. Given the trauma and heartbreak that these people experience in taking these horrible journeys, I hope that the UK will keep in sight and take leadership for the need for economic growth in their countries. I hope that my noble friend will assure the House that she will talk to Ministers in DfID and the Foreign Office to ensure that we tackle these issues at source rather than wait for people to take dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean.
Baroness Verma
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. The Minister was right: it has been an extremely well-informed and well-tempered debate. My noble friend has not managed to answer a number of questions; if she reads through Hansard, I am sure that she will find them and then put them in writing and put copies in the Library for us to read.
We have all recognised the importance of Operation Sophia—but, as all noble Lords have said, it does not fulfil its mandate. At the end of this year, when the Government, along with the other 27 member states, review whether to renew the mandate, we hope that they will seriously consider whether the operation is succeeding, what its failings are and whether it should continue with the mandate that it has been given.
My noble friend the Minister said that it is saving lives. Absolutely—not one noble Lord in this Chamber would want the humanitarian side of Operation Sophia to be halted. However, it needs to look at whether we are putting even further at risk people who are trying to travel across the Mediterranean in boats that are less safe now because they understand that they will be picked up.
I am really pleased that we have my noble friend Lady Chalker, with all her experience, on our committee. Her contribution demonstrated her years of experience and her ability to look at issues with a mature and sensible eye. The departments that work for us need to take heed of and advice from this committee and others, with their experience, in looking at the source of these problems. They are economic problems and yes, there will be problems involving genuine refugees—but if we are the humane nation that I hope we are, we should take these issues into consideration. We have always led the world in showing how such things should be done; the British people have been the most generous when it comes to giving.
In that spirit, I hope that the Minister will tell her colleagues that, if we are going to take the Operation Sophia mandate forward, it must be done with much more vigour to break the business model as well as address the humanitarian side.