Human Rights on the Indian Subcontinent

Debate between Fiona Mactaggart and Denis MacShane

Thursday 15th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

Kashmir is the forgotten tragedy of the contemporary world. No other people has suffered such pain, such loss, such despair, and, worst of all, such a sense that their demands for justice are being ignored by the rest of the world. Here in the House of Commons we need to face up to our failures.

The first failure was the disastrous handling of the end of British imperialism in India. The second was the refusal of both India and Pakistan to abide by UN resolution 47, which stated:

“the final disposition of the State of Jammu and Kashmir will be made in accordance with the will of the people expressed through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.”

That resolution was adopted in 1948; 63 years later, it has still not been implemented. The third failure is the refusal of successive British Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries of all parties to accept that Britain has an historical duty to work to allow the Kashmiri people to be free of the oppression under which they live.

Kashmir is not a faraway country of which we know nothing. The British Kashmiri community is now nearly 1 million strong and is part of the warp and weft of today’s Britain, just as in the past Huguenots, Jews, Poles and Irish people came with their culture, faith, languages and ways of life and became part of our island nation. I think of many dear friends in Rotherham, such as Councillor Jahangir Akhtar, Councillor Shaukat Ali, Councillor Mahroof Hussain, Mrs Parveen Quereshi, and Lord Nazir Ahmed in the other place, as well as friends in Tinsley and Sheffield, who have educated me on the problem of Kashmir.

According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—irreproachable international organisations—as many as 100,000 Kashmiri Muslims have died since the end of the 1980s. That is a far higher death toll of Muslims than all of those killed in middle east conflicts in recent decades. Whereas the middle east conflict gets limitless geopolitical Government and media attention, the much great death toll in Kashmir is ignored. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights reports that 1.5 million refugees have been forced over the years to seek asylum across the border in Pakistan or Azad Kashmir.

In December last year, I wrote to the Foreign Secretary after receiving a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Its officials interviewed under private conditions 1,296 people held by India. Among them 498 had suffered torture from electricity; 381 had been suspended from the ceiling; 294 had muscles crushed in their legs by prison personnel sitting on a bar placed across their thighs; 181 had their legs stretched by being “split 180 degrees”; and 302 “sexual” cases were reported involving rape or sexual assault. The ICRC stated:

“The abuse always takes place in the presence of officers”

from India.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

As a former journalist, would my right hon. Friend like to speculate on why those horrible tortures have failed to reach our media?

[Mr MacShane]

There is a serious problem in that this is the first debate dedicated to this subject in my 17 years in the House. I very much respect the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), but Ministers have not raised this issue at a sufficiently high level. I hope that the Minister can assure the House that the Foreign Secretary will raise that recent Red Cross report with India at the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference next month.

A few years ago the world was shocked at the death of 8,000 European Muslims in Srebrenica and the sight of 250,000 Kosovan Muslims fleeing from Serb troops. Why has there been silence on 1.5 million Kashmiris being forced out of their homes or up to 100,000 Muslims killed by Indian forces?

Just before he was elected, President Obama made the correct connection, noting that there would be no solution in Afghanistan without change in Pakistan, but he added that Pakistan needed help from India to resolve the Kashmir question. Afghanistan, Pakistan, India—the API triangle that lies at the heart of any future for this vital world region. Sadly, once in office President Obama dropped India, out of his desire to see movement and, as a result, got no movement at all, despite the best efforts of the late Richard Holbrooke. India is part of the problem, as is Pakistan. India must be part of the solution, as must Pakistan. Until the global community faces down India’s refusal to accept responsibility for its actions in Kashmir, there will be no peace in the region. It is time to break the silence that grips British Ministers.

Human Trafficking

Debate between Fiona Mactaggart and Denis MacShane

Wednesday 18th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

As is usual on this subject, we have had an excellent debate with a great deal of consensus among Members of all parties. I thank the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) for bringing this subject before the House once again. As he pointed out, it was an accident that we discussed it only last week, but it is often helpful for Members of Parliament to be able to follow up on a previous debate. Some issues in the last debate were not resolved, and I hope that when the Minister responds, we will hear some of the answers that have been re-requested during this debate.

I welcomed the hon. Gentleman’s call for a multi-agency, one-stop approach. I agree that we need a strategy: not just broad aims, but specific commitments. In order to deliver that as the House and society would want, we need a rapporteur of sufficient independence for everyone to have confidence in the information that they produce. I welcome all those aspects of his remarks.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane) reminded us that to tackle trafficking, we must have an effective strategy for driving down demand for the products of trafficking. I was concerned to hear his remarks about STOP UK, and I hope that the Minister will deal with that in his response.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) reminded us that the women and children involved in trafficking are treated as commodities, like used cars. It is not enough for us to say the right words across parties; we need action to tackle the problem, and specifically action to prevent the threat from coming to London along with the Olympics in a year’s time.

My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) remarked on the Home Office’s problems in managing the process and advised us of the opportunity to consider whether what Scotland is doing on child guardianship can provide models or lessons for the rest of the United Kingdom.

In my view, we are a little complacent about our quality of victim care. I was rather shocked to read a research report by the London School of Economics and the university of Goettingen suggesting that the United Kingdom was less effective than Albania at tackling human trafficking. The reason why the report came to that conclusion involved our treatment of victims. Most of the study was done while the POPPY project, which we all admire, was providing victim services, but the researchers felt that the UK habit of convicting the victims of trafficking—we have heard about children being convicted of cannabis cultivation, for example—means that the quality of our trafficking strategy is less good than that of many countries that we would expect to outperform.

[Mr MacShane]

My hon. Friend mentioned the London School of Economics. Is she aware of its feminist political theory course, taught by Professor Anne Phillips? In week 8 of the course, students study prostitution. The briefing says:

“If we consider it legitimate for women to hire themselves out as low-paid and often badly treated cleaners, why is it not also legitimate for them to hire themselves out as prostitutes?”

If a professor at the London School of Economics cannot make the distinction between a cleaning woman and a prostituted woman, we are filling the minds of our young students with the most poisonous drivel.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I share my right hon. Friend’s view about those attitudes. I hope that the LSE provides sufficient contest to Professor Phillips’s frankly nauseating views on that issue.

To return to victim care, one of my absolute concerns is that victims should be supported to be identified as victims. I am anxious that the national referral mechanism requires a referral, through a multi-tick-box questionnaire, by an appropriate authority, does not accept all attempts at referral and does not always make good decisions. During our recent debate, I asked the Minister whether he would ensure that the new victim care organisations—the Salvation Army and its subcontractors—were supported in challenging decisions under the national referral mechanism if victims were not initially identified as such, and that they were funded to support those people. The experience of the POPPY project is that many trafficked victims were not originally given reasonable-grounds decisions or conclusive decisions on their trafficking status.

The Minister reminded me that

“support providers are asked to, and helped to, provide information about victims’ experiences and circumstances to the competent authority precisely to ensure that the correct NRM decision is reached”.—[Official Report, 9 May 2011; Vol. 527, c. 994.]

I hoped, in the cut and thrust of debate, that that was a positive answer, but my view on reflection is that it is not. I would like a specific commitment from him today that if an organisation supporting a victim helps that victim challenge a decision by the NRM, it will be funded to support the victim. One of the tasks of such organisations, if they believe professionally that someone is a victim of trafficking, is to advocate on their behalf with the competent authorities. I hope that he can give us that assurance.

In addition, I am concerned, as are other hon. Members, about the transparency of the process. The Serious Organised Crime Agency has not produced an annual report since Jacqui Smith was Home Secretary. We do not have any compelling data about decisions under the NRM or enforcement actions taken by police. One reason for calling for a rapporteur is to ensure that such data exist.

The Minister suggested that the role of rapporteur could properly be fulfilled by the inter-ministerial group, the NRM and the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre. At the moment, that is not happening. Will he make a commitment during this debate to a specific mechanism for ensuring transparency? Unless we have a formal rapporteur charged with providing that transparency, we cannot properly interrogate what the Government are doing.

A specific example is the disappearance of children from care, which Members have mentioned. If we believe that local authorities are providing adequate guardianship services, can we please have a national study of how many trafficked children are in local authority care and of which local authorities lose children and how many, and a report to Parliament on how those issues are handled?

The Minister makes a reasonable point when he says that it is possible for the directive’s guardianship requirements to be fulfilled by local authority responsibilities. I think that that could be possible. I am not saying that his decision to do that is mere penny-pinching—although it obviously is, partly because of pressure on funds—but it cannot be done under the present arrangement, because so many local authorities are, frankly, incompetent in this area. We do not know how many are involved or which ones are making good progress. I hope that the Minister will commit to that, because without that kind of transparency, any claim to fulfil a rapporteur-type function is unfounded.

My final concern relates to the role of the police. My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk mentioned how Vic Hogg was invited to address the all-party group on the trafficking of women and children, but did not turn up because apparently, at the last moment, he did not have a job. I have spoken to representatives from civil society organisations involved in this field. They feel that meetings with the Home Office to discuss the strategy have been frustrating, disorganised and unclear.

I do not believe that the Minister wants a disorganised and unclear strategy—I am not accusing him of a deliberate policy. Nor do I believe that he wants to exclude those excellent organisations—ECPAT UK, the POPPY Project, the Salvation Army, the Medaille Trust and so on—from contributing to the strategy. I am concerned, however, that there is a real risk, because the former strategy was extremely specific and connected police operations, which have been the most powerful way of discovering the extent of trafficking.

The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster has pointed out how the research is not very good, because the subject is an illegal activity. Actions by the police have been more effective. They have illustrated more powerfully the range of trafficking and where it is to be found, and have led to some successful prosecutions. I am concerned that, at present, we do not have any nationally directed operations, and that the consequence of that will be that we will lose expertise among the police.

I hope that the Minister can reassure us that, even if the Home Office does not wish, at present, to direct police forces to mount those kinds of national operations, it will support and enable them to do so. Without Operation Golf, the excessive trafficking of children from the town of Tandarei in Romania, many of whom were trafficked into my constituency, and the grotesque profits made by criminals in that town, would have continued unabated.

Strategic national interventions that are properly directed can protect people more effectively than a strategy and the warm words that we are able to produce in this Chamber. I believe that we are all on the same side, but we need a strategy to ensure that the shared ambition to eradicate this modern form of slavery actually works in practice.