Future of DFID

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), whom I commend for securing this debate. He and my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) rightly criticised the Secretary of State’s effort to get the rules on development assistance changed. She seeks to undermine rules that have rightly forced Governments around the world, including ours, to be held to account for the amount of development assistance they give the world’s poorest people. It was good to hear the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) make a similar point. I take credit for much of his success as Secretary of State, because I schooled him while he was in training as the shadow Secretary of State.

There are three compelling arguments both for Britain sticking to its 0.7% level of funding for international development assistance, and for retaining the Department for International Development. First, there is a moral argument. We are one of the richest nations in the world. Surely we have a responsibility to help those in other countries who, through no fault of their own, live in terrible circumstances.

Secondly, it is surely in our country’s interests to try to support countries around the world in becoming stable, so their populations do not have to flee either to our country or to neighbouring countries. We should help them become stable so that their economies can grow, and they can have strong public services of the sort we would recognise. Given that conflict is much more likely to break out in a country where there has recently been conflict, if we continue to want to reduce the amount we spend collectively on peacekeeping, it is surely sensible to put in the hard yards by providing development assistance to help those countries get strong, effective Governments who are respected by people of all opinions.

The third argument is about soft power, which others mentioned. As a result of its huge commitment to international development, Britain is highly regarded at the United Nations. It was always highly regarded in the European Union and in a whole series of other international forums because of the work it did on development assistance, and the knowledge that everyone in the Government was committed to maintaining and enhancing the role of the Department for International Development and the aid budget.

Arguments against spending 0.7% are being made again, predominantly by people from the right of political discourse. It is argued that charities know best. I have a lot of respect for charities, particularly Britain’s charities. They make a considerable difference in the areas in which they are able to operate. However, no global player other than the Department for International Development can operate at the level that is needed to transform the poorest countries by providing aid that helps to build up the effectiveness of their Governments. Charity has a role to play, a demonstrative role in particular, and it certainly plays a useful role when a tsunami or other humanitarian crises occur, but we need to build up Governments in other countries.

Corruption is a risk, but if we use our aid money effectively, we help to strengthen the systems that stop corruption continuing to be a problem. As for the idea that charity should begin at home, every Member of the House can give examples of further Government funding being required in their constituency, and I hope we will see a change in direction when a new Government are in place, so that more resources can be made available for all of us, but I again make the point that we are one of the richest nations in the world, and we should be able to provide further development assistance.

I simply do not buy the idea that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is somehow diminished by the effectiveness of the Department for International Development. They have different roles, and they complement each other. We want a strong Foreign Office, but its strength will not be ended by an effective Department for International Development. I hope that the Secretary of State changes the language that she deploys, and that the Department’s future can be guaranteed.

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[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Harriett Baldwin)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on securing today’s debate. It is worth highlighting that we have had a range of excellent speeches, eight of which were from Conservative and Democratic Unionist party colleagues, while there are five Labour Members here. The way in which the issues were raised in the debate, and the endorsement that the Conservative manifesto at the last election gave to the 0.7%, sets our record straight right off the bat, in terms of our commitment and our pride in being part of the movement that put 0.7% in statute—we are the only country in the world to have done that so far—and to the Government’s policy to retain the Department for International Development as a stand-alone Department. The reasons for that were well articulated by a range of Members.

I am a Minister in both the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That makes a great deal of sense because, to highlight just one, South Sudan, of the worst humanitarian crises—where some of our biggest DFID budgets are—we can see that it is entirely a man-made conflict, and we need to work not only through providing humanitarian assistance, but by doing what we can on the political track to try to bring that conflict to a resolution. That is why it makes sense for me and the Minister for the Middle East to be in both Departments.

We have heard a range of excellent speeches, many of them focused on history and some of the lessons we have learned through history on how to do what we do more effectively. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), who spoke eloquently about the role of the Department, many of the people who have served in the Department over the years, and the role of overseas development assistance in soft power and Global Britain. His characteristic modesty did not allow him to mention that he, I think, came up with “UK aid—from the British people”. That is now widely used in our projects—I saw it on an Ethiopian water tank only last week. We should pay tribute to him for that; I know Ministers would like to see more of it.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) spoke about M-KOPA and CDC. I was glad to hear that, because I have not always heard a consistent message of support from Labour Members on CDC, the private sector development arm. It brings a great deal of private sector capital into development issues and M-KOPA, which he highlighted, is a particularly good example.

The Conflict, Stability and Security Fund plays an important role. I reassure colleagues that 100% of our 0.7% spending comes in a form that is approved by the Development Assistance Committee. We have pushed to change some of the rules over the years and have been successful in doing that, and my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) highlighted one of those successes. We have also been able to get the allocation for peacekeeping up from 7% to 15%. The role of the UN peacekeepers is important and the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund providing the foundation of peace and security for development is vital.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) rightly highlighted the important work that has been done through the aid budget to tackle a wide range of diseases, not just malaria and neglected tropical diseases but diseases such as polio. He spoke of the need for long-term development funding, which we do primarily through the World Bank now. He is making a powerful case for the UK to have its own bank. He rightly highlighted the importance of the Small Charities Challenge Fund and the aid match projects that allow us to match one-to-one the wishes of the British public with spending.

[Gareth Thomas]

The Minister will be aware of the SheDecides global movement, which supports the right of every girl and woman to make the decisions that only they should make. SheDecides Day is coming up fast. Will the Minister tell the House why the Secretary of State has not agreed to be an ambassador for the movement?

[Harriett Baldwin]

I cannot, because I was not aware of it, but I know that there is no one who women and girls around the world can count on more than our Secretary of State for her championing of the need to put women and girls first. It is putting women and girls first, and creating an environment where they do well, that enables the rest of the country to do well. That is vital and is incorporated in all of our programming.

The hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) also raised the issue of corruption, which is an example of where cross-Government working is so important, so that we can work with the National Crime Agency to tackle some of the financial flows and corruption that flow from some developing countries where we are spending overseas development assistance, through the UK courts and UK financial system. It is a good example of where we need to work across government.

Members discussed the fact that some other Departments spend overseas development assistance. Of course they do, for a range of things, whether that is trade, development, the work of the National Crime Agency, the work on the environment and plastics through the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, or the work that we do on tackling climate change, which needs to be joined-up across government. There was a wide outbreak of consensus on that.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) raised an important, underlying function: for us to save lives through what we do with aid. He was absolutely right to highlight that. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) highlighted the importance of value for money and being able to tell the British taxpayer that we are getting it. The debate has allowed us to highlight some excellent examples of value for money.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Craig Tracey), who I thank for the excellent work he did as my previous Private Parliamentary Secretary—he would be welcome back any time; he just needs to support the withdrawal agreement—highlighted that it is not just that the money should be spent well, but that it could not be spent better. The hon. Members for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) and for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) also made supportive comments.

I am glad to be able to reassure hon. Members that it is indeed Government policy to continue with the excellent stand-alone work of the Department for International Development. We can point to a strong track record of delivering results. We will continue to work across Government in a joined-up way in trying to achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030. We have heard a lot about the past of the Department. The future of the Department must surely be about focusing on achieving the sustainable development goals and on spending more of our money in areas of extreme poverty.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Duncan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right—indeed, that is exactly what my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary has been doing over the past week in his travels around the capitals of Europe—and I fully agree with her, as do Her Majesty’s Government, that burden sharing is important. We have been making that point with European partners—NATO partners in Europe —and I am pleased to say that there is progress, but there is still more to be done.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

A strengthened transatlantic alliance could lead to more action in Sri Lanka to tackle human rights abuses. Will the Minister of State urge the Trump Administration to join him and the Foreign Secretary in putting pressure on the Sri Lankan Government to tackle human rights abuses and to respect international calls for a war crimes inquiry?

[Sir Alan Duncan]

As the hon. Gentleman appreciates, I do not personally cover Sri Lanka. However, I am confident that, across the world, we work very closely together on all issues of human rights, and we will continue to do so in countries as appropriate.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

If President Sirisena will not back down on the apparent return of Mahinda Rajapaksa—a man with a terrible human rights record in Sri Lanka—what further steps will the Foreign Secretary take with our European allies to demonstrate the seriousness of Britain’s concern about this matter?

[Mark Field]

We very much hope that President Sirisena will back down and will adhere to the constitution, which of course means bringing back Parliament at the earliest opportunity. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, when he alludes at least to this, that we are actively co-ordinating our response within the international community. We believe that a concerted international response will have the most effect.

Reproductive Rights

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Stella Creasy]

First and foremost, we should listen to African women, and they are consistently clear that they would like control over their own bodies. Being forced to continue an unwanted pregnancy is no freedom or liberation at all.

For every country where there is progress, we also see the tightening grip of the anti-choice movement. Let us not call it “pro-life”; there is nothing pro-life about forcing a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy. In Europe—our own continent—Poland now has some of the strictest rules on abortion in the world, and abortion is allowed only if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, if the woman’s life is in danger, or in cases of severe or fatal foetal abnormality. Consequently, 80,000 Polish women a year go abroad or seek illegal abortions at home.

America now has a President who says that women should be “punished” if they have an abortion, and a Vice-President who believes that women who have a miscarriage should report it and hold a funeral. One Governor signed a law that states that it is illegal to have an abortion once a foetal heartbeat has been detected. Given that heartbeats can be detected as early as six weeks into a pregnancy—sometimes before a women even realises she is pregnant—that is no freedom or liberation at all.

In El Salvador, abortion is illegal with no exceptions, and that horrendous ban violates the basic human rights of women in that country. At least 23 women and girls remain in prison as a result of the abortion ban, and one woman, Teodora del Carmen Vasquez, walked out of prison a few weeks ago after more than a decade of imprisonment. She was marked as a criminal because she began bleeding and suffered a stillbirth. She was sentenced to 30 years for aggravated homicide, and released only after the Supreme Court ruled that there was not enough evidence to show that she had killed her baby. Abortion may be permitted in Rwanda, but Rwandan police unjustly arrest and imprison hundreds of women on abortion-related charges—such women make up 25% of the female prison population.

The number of maternal deaths resulting from illegal abortions represents the truth: banning abortion does not stop abortion; it simply makes it unsafe. In Africa, a quarter of all those who have an unsafe abortion are adolescent girls. Indeed, about half of the 20,000 Nigerian women who die from unsafe abortions each year are adolescents. It is insulting to suggest that African women do not deserve the rights that we would fight for in our country and around the world. Africa shows us how vital international aid is, as is the job that the Minister is intended to do. Abortion is relatively legal in Zambia, but only 16% of women have access to abortion facilities—in Zambia’s Central Province, there is just one medical doctor for more than 110,000 patients.

Closer to home we see the impact of restrictions on access to healthcare services for women. In the Republic of Ireland, the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act 2013 imposed an almost total criminalisation of abortion. Ireland is one of a few countries in Europe with such highly restrictive abortion laws. The Irish constitution currently affords equal rights to the life of a foetus and to the life of a woman. However, the 18,000 women from Ireland who have travelled to the UK since 2012 reflect the fact that stopping access to abortion does not stop abortion, it just puts people at risk, including—increasingly—at risk from taking pills they have bought online. At the end of this week the Irish will go to the polls. I plead for dignity, for compassion in a crisis, and to ensure that every Irish person can care for their own at home, that there will be a yes vote.

But who are we to lecture? We should not forget how we treat women in our own backyard, particularly in Northern Ireland, which has some of the harshest laws and punishments in Europe for women who undergo an abortion. A woman with an unwanted pregnancy in Northern Ireland must either travel to the mainland or procure abortion pills online. Since the Government agreed to fund those abortions on the NHS, more than 700 women have travelled to England or Scotland from Northern Ireland. However, those are the women who are able to travel and get away from family commitments, who are not in a coercive relationship, and who have their travel documents. Little wonder that the United Nations condemned the United Kingdom for its treatment of Northern Irish women, which it called cruel, degrading and inhuman.

The Minister might say that each of those examples is due to separate policy decisions in those countries, but I want to sound the alarm and call attention to the fact that that might not be the case. Increasingly, around the world, far-right organisations and extreme religious groups are co-ordinating and funding anti-abortion and anti-choice campaigns. We in this House are used to debating the impact of foreign countries interfering in our democracy—perhaps in referendums—and we should be alive to the fact that those foreign organisations and countries are interfering in a woman’s basic right to choose. The real “The Handmaid’s Tale” is now unfolding.

In 2013, American and European campaigners met in this capital city to plan their campaign. It is called Restoring the Natural Order: an Agenda for Europe, and it seeks to overturn basic laws on human rights related to sexuality and reproduction. Since that meeting, we have seen the impact of those organisations, and the funding they have provided. We have seen how they produced results in Poland with the ban on abortion, and with bans on equal marriage in several central European countries and action on LGBT rights. We have seen how they have targeted international aid in the UK, Europe and America.

In 2013-14 the European Citizens Initiative, One of Us, called on the European Commission to propose legislation that would ensure that EU funds could not be used to fund abortion. It garnered 1.7 million signatures, and although the EU rejected that petition, given the impact it would have on women’s healthcare, that was by no means a one-off. Such rhetoric is coming back.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend and commend her comments. Does she think that now is the moment for the Government to give enthusiastic backing to the SheDecides movement that has emerged since the decision by the American President, Donald Trump, to reimpose the global gag rule? In the light of her comments about anti-abortion campaigners coming together, that would be a powerful signal of Britain’s opposition to that movement.

[Stella Creasy]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and am extremely proud of the work that he did in government when the global gag rule was first introduced, standing up to what it represented as well as putting our money where our mouth is. We should recognise that the global gag rule under the present President is far worse than the original one. It states that no US funds will go to any organisation that provides for women to be referred for abortion, or advocates doing so. The policy may be called “protecting life in global health assistance”, but it is clear that it is leading to an increase in maternal deaths. Trump has expanded the rule that was in force under previous Republican Presidents to cover all US health assistance funds, whereas previously it was only about family planning.

Marie Stopes International estimates that its loss of US funding will result, between 2017 and 2020, in 6.5 million unintended pregnancies, 2.1 million unsafe abortions and 21,000 maternal deaths, let alone the impact on access to reproductive healthcare, including work on HIV, gender-based violence and sexually transmitted diseases. We can already see the impact. In Botswana, the prevalence of HIV is among the highest in the world at 18.5% of the general population. The Botswana Family Welfare Association provided a range of healthcare and family planning services, and 60% of its funding has been threatened, because America is—or was—the largest funder of overseas healthcare. In Swaziland, family planning, antenatal and post-natal services and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases are key services from the Family Life Association of Swaziland, and there has been a clear impact. US support accounted for 25% of its annual funding. That is why there is now a massive funding gap that needs to be filled.

I am sure that the Minister will tell us about a summit to be held in this country in June promoting the idea that abortion is part of the services that we provide around the world, but we have not, as a country, put our money where our mouth is. We have not put money into the SheDecides fund. That matters. It does not matter if we are funding other services: our approach matters because of what the global gag rule represents, what a co-ordinated attack on a woman’s basic right to choose means, and what that says about the world, and our commitment to equality. That is why it matters whether we contribute. It is about solidarity. It is also about saying that there should be no shame in seeking an abortion. I hope we would all want women to be safe, and abortion to be legal, and rare—but we do not want women to suffer in silence or to be oppressed as the network in question would want. That network brings together President Trump and his supporters, and Russian oligarchs, in funding organisations that claim to promote family values—but only the ones that they choose.

In Poland, the “stop abortion law” was drafted by ultra-conservative lawyers from an organisation called Ordo Iuris. Agenda Europe, an organisation that started here, in our country, was able to attract senior members of the Polish Government, including the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Konrad Szymański, and the Polish Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Aleksander Stępkowski, who was also president of Ordo Iuris. The same groups are now active in Ireland, in the referendum. It is little wonder that Google and Facebook have been so concerned about the impact of foreign organisations on the fairness of the Irish referendum that they have stopped all foreign-funded advertising about the Irish referendum on their platforms. Agenda Europe summits gather a veritable “Who’s Who” of anti-choice and anti-LGBT movements around the world, such as the architects of the Croatian traditional marriage referendum, the citizens’ initiative on traditional marriage in Romania, HazteOir in Spain, which has sought abortion restrictions, and the French organization Les Survivants, which claims that everyone in French society shares a collective trauma, potentially, because of the experience of abortion. The organisation even developed a Pokémon app where the aim of the game is to save Pikachu from abortionists.

Such rhetoric and funding are clearly having an impact on our democracies and on women; they are having an effect. Indeed, Agenda Europe has targeted the Council of Europe. It would be useful to know who it works with in this country, because it is not transparent about it. If the Minister recognises the danger of the rhetoric and of a lack of solidarity over women’s basic rights, will he investigate the links between organisations such as the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, Christian Action Research and Education, which funds an all-party parliamentary group in this place, and Agenda Europe? Those groups do not just mobilise and target politicians; they also spread lies such as abortion causes breast cancer, and claim that Planned Parenthood is involved in the illegal selling of foetal tissue. In developing countries, they spread rumours that the west is trying to impose western women’s human rights. Internationally, they have promoted and supported the intimidation of women seeking abortions, as has happened in this country with pickets outside abortion clinics.

There have been such protests at 42 clinics already. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq), who has done sterling work on the issue, has pointed out, that is not protest in the usual sense. The protesters are not seeking to change the law. They want to harass and target women who have come to a difficult decision and who seek access to lawful healthcare. Indeed, when the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), reviewed the matter last year, she said that it was

“completely unacceptable that anyone should feel harassed or intimidated”

for exercising the legal right in question. Less than two weeks ago such protesters took part in a “march for life” through the capital city. I note that there are links with our political organisations. One person at the London meeting was Oliver Hylton, the asset manager for a UK Conservative party donor, Sir Michael Hintze. The new Conservative party vice-chair has called for a reduction in the time limit for abortion, arguing that we need to debate the issue. That is a classic tactic set out in the Agenda Europe campaign bible. That is despite evidence that 92% of abortions are carried out at less than 13 weeks’ gestation in this country.

In addition, women are being criminalised for obtaining abortion pills, reflecting how our legislation and legislation around the world is cripplingly out of date: 5,650 women from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland accessed pills online, to create an abortion, from Women on Web. Twenty-six per cent. were aged between 30 and 34. The majority were mothers. They were women making their own choice about how their own body should be treated. Without legal access to the pills, they risk problems. There is currently a judicial review in Northern Ireland of the case of a 15-year-old girl, whose mother procured abortion pills for her online. The girl’s case was referred to social services as she was in an abusive relationship, and somehow the GP notes were turned over to the police. Even with a suspended sentence, that young girl will have a criminal conviction. This country must not leave her in that situation. We must act to protect young women around the world making choices about their bodies. Women deserve access to what is a basic healthcare procedure, and do not deserve to be shamed for making choices about their bodies. They deserve our trust, and do not deserve to have to fight for their rights every day against a shadowy organisation involving the collusion of religious and far-right groups. They deserve a Government who will stand up to that network and stand with them.

Will the Minister investigate whether any of his ministerial colleagues have met representatives of Agenda Europe, whether in a parliamentary or political capacity? Did they, for example, take part in the decision to give Life money from the tampon tax? Have Foreign Office ministers met Agenda Europe in their lobbying work in Europe? What action is the UK taking to assist Polish women who now face one of the most restrictive regimes in the world, or to fight for the rights of women in El Salvador? Will the Government change their mind and commit to putting money into the SheDecides fund to send a strong message that those who seek to make men and women unequal will not be tolerated? Will they ensure that the laws governing access to abortion in Northern Ireland fully comply with international human rights law, including the decriminalising of abortion? Will they act to give the idea of buffer zones legal status in the UK, and promote it elsewhere? To put it simply, I trust women and we are asking whether the Government do.

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[Alistair Burt]

I do not think there is any message that we are not. I am pointing out the work we are doing. The hon. Lady called for deeds—not words or association with movements just for the sake of it and for the symbolism, but what we are actually doing. I will look at SheDecides. The position, as I think she knows, is that my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), then a Minister in the Department, went to the launch of SheDecides. We support the objectives of SheDecides. We are putting support into a whole range of services. I understand the symbolism and the point she makes. I will look at that and see whether there is more to be done than simply supporting and putting money into what SheDecides does. If an attachment to SheDecides makes a difference, that may be something that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I will want to do.

I urge the hon. Lady not to take our decision not to be formally involved in that, but to support that work, to mean that all the other work we are doing either does not matter or is not important enough. That is dancing on the head of a pin. It degrades all the work that all our colleagues are doing all over the world to defend women’s rights, promote women’s services and promote access to safe abortion, just because we are not doing one thing that she would like us to do. I am not sure I want to go down that route. I would rather defend what we do and how positive and forward-looking it is.

[Gareth Thomas]

I do not think that anybody on the Opposition side questions the investment that the Government are making through the Department for International Development—I welcome that. The concern is that the Government have not had the courage to stand up to the American President over his reintroduction of the global gag rule and to show solidarity with all the other countries that have challenged him and are seeking to galvanise even greater investment in access to reproductive services, to plug the gap that the American decision on the global gag rule has left.

[Alistair Burt]

I take the point. Again, our work concentrates on advocating for the best services, and on getting individual states and people within those states to understand the purpose and importance of access to safe abortion. Being involved with political movements is a different question. We are keen to ensure that the work we do supports the policies behind something such as SheDecides, which is what we are doing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alistair Burt]

I have already given a commitment to go back and look at the engagement with SheDecides. I will make it quite clear: we support the overarching principles of SheDecides; a Minister attended the launch; we work with all partners who are promoting universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights; and we think that it is most sustainable to demonstrate our commitment to those issues through long-term, sustained support for sexual and reproductive health and rights. We face the consequences of US policy not just in this area, but in others. The response we have delivered so far is to put investment and support into the work that is done, and to say, “This is the best answer to those who wish to close it down.”

I take the point that the hon. Lady and colleagues have challenged me on in relation to the SheDecides movement, but I ask her not to be completely distracted by that. Our deeds in supporting and promoting services, the £1.25 billion that we are putting into this work through our support for family planning services, and the work we are doing in a variety of other areas—I can set them out in a letter to the hon. Lady, as we are running short of time—demonstrate our commitment to what is done.

I take the point about the political movement. I have no knowledge of or connection with the other movement she speaks about—I have never met Europe Now, or whoever they are. I am not aware of any contact in the Department, but I will check. But I would not want us to be pinned on this question in this debate, in which the hon. Lady has spoken about things that I believe in and I want to see. She has spoken about things that the Government are doing and delivering, and she seeks to pin me on one particular part of it, a political policy in relation to a particular movement that we already support and attended the launch of. In all fairness, she is trying to find a very small area of difference between us.

[Gareth Thomas]

That is not fair.

[Alistair Burt]

That is how it sounds. The message from this debate should be, “We support each other, and we support what we are trying to do.” If we campaign together, we might have even more success with this policy than we already have.

Question put and agreed to.

Refugees and Human Rights

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Wednesday 24th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. I will develop those arguments later and look forward to listening to his speech, if he gets an opportunity to be heard.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Further to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd), will my right hon. Friend take this opportunity to praise the work of the International Organization for Migration, a key UN agency leading the effort to provide solutions to the refugee crisis? Will she also take this opportunity to urge the Government, and particularly the Department for International Development, to increase funding for that key UN agency?

[Emily Thornberry]

Particularly given its current role in Bangladesh, because of the distress of the Rohingya refugees, it is clearly important to put renewed focus on that organisation. It is also unfortunate that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is not given a greater role in Bangladesh.

In my speech, I shall talk about each of those five challenges and the countries they affect—countries where the humanitarian crisis is clear and the need for global leadership is clear, but where, at present, the Government’s response is anything but.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alistair Burt]

My right hon. Friend the Minister for Asia and the Pacific wants to refer to climate change in his winding-up speech, but our determination on climate change has, again, provided a sense of leadership. We have played an influential role in reaching international climate change agreements, including the Paris accord, and we are among the world’s leading providers of climate finance. We are committed to the Paris agreement limits, which aim to limit global temperature rises to less than 2 °C. Wherever there are areas in which we can continue to improve, we shall do so, but on climate change leadership, the United Kingdom’s position is very clear.

On international humanitarian rights, I reiterate the UK’s commitment to international humanitarian, human rights and refugee law. As a signatory to the 1951 refugee convention and its additional protocol, the UK has a long tradition of providing assistance and protection to those who need it most. We are the first G7 nation to have enshrined in law our commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on aid, and that aid provides a lifeline to millions.

The first change I want to put to the House is that refugee crises are increasingly counted in decades, not months and years, and the humanitarian system is overstretched. This is why the UK is now leading a global shift to longer-term approaches to refugee assistance and protection. It is one that restores dignity to refugees and offers them a more viable future where they are, and one that ensures sustainable jobs, livelihoods and access to essential services both for refugees and the communities that host them. We aim to embed this approach in the UN global compact on refugees due to be adopted later this year.

[Gareth Thomas]

One graphic reminder of the global refugee crisis is the plight of refugees, particularly unaccompanied minors, in Calais. Will the Foreign Office Minister encourage the Home Office to deal more quickly with cases such as that of the 14-year-old brother of one of my constituents, who is still waiting for the Home Office to respond to his application to come and rejoin his brother, my constituent, under the Dublin III convention? If I write to the Minister, will he take up the case with the Home Office for me?

[Alistair Burt]

The hon. Gentleman should keep in direct contact with the Home Office in relation to that case. In 2016, the UK transferred more than 900 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from Europe to the UK, including more than 750 from France as part of the UK’s support for the Calais camp clearance. I have some figures to give later about the 49,000 children who have been settled in the United Kingdom since 2010, including a number in the category that the hon. Gentleman has raised. However, processes have to be gone through, and I am quite sure that the Home Office intends to carry out its resettlement work as swiftly as possible. We have resettled a substantial number—that number is often not appreciated by the public at large—and I will talk more about that in a moment.

Draft African Development Bank (Fourteenth Replenishment of the African Development Fund) Order 2017 Draft Asian Development Bank (Eleventh Replenishment of the Asian Development Fund) Order 2017 Draft Caribbean Development Bank (Ninth Replenishment of the Unified Special Development Fund) Order 2017

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 General Committees

[Rory Stewart]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I will speak to all three draft orders in a single speech: the first pertains to the African Development Bank, the second to the Asian Development Bank and the third to the Caribbean Development Bank. Right hon. and hon. Members will be aware of our relationship with multinational development banks in general and why we work with them, so I will not waste too much time talking about that, but will focus instead on these specific banks and the money that we are giving them.

The overall argument is clear: the United Kingdom and other development partners give money to these banks because they allow us to do three things that would be difficult to do if we did not work with them. First, they give us a specialist reach into geographies in which the Department for International Development might not otherwise operate. For example, the Caribbean Development Bank specialises in small island states, and some of our work with the African Development Bank is in places such as the Central African Republic, where we do not have a permanent office. That is the geographical point.

Secondly, the banks allow us to leverage larger amounts of money than we would be able to provide on our own.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Who is the head of the Caribbean Development Bank and when did the Minister last have a conversation with him?

[Rory Stewart]

The last correspondence with the Caribbean Development Bank was conducted by the new Secretary of State, whose letter to Dr Smith I have here. It is about an improvement plan. I am responsible for Africa, not directly for the Caribbean; work for the Caribbean is conducted by my colleague, Lord Bates.

If I can proceed, there are three types of argument for working with the three banks. The first is geographic; the second is about leveraging larger amounts of funds. We typically contribute 10%, 13% or 14% of the funds, particularly the concessional loan facilities for the banks, which allows us to leverage additional money. The third argument is the sector speciality and expertise provided by these banks. For example, the Asian Development Bank has expertise in energy and transport infrastructure in places such as Pakistan, which DFID would not have on its own.

Why these particular amounts of money? The first amount is £460 million, which will be given to the African Development Bank. The bank is run by a very distinguished Nigerian civil servant, Mr Adesina. It was set up in 1964 as part of a general development with regional banks that emerged from the first Bretton Woods institutions, which were set up in the 1940s to specialise in different regions. The African Development Bank allows us to work in some of the poorest countries in the world; as Members will be aware, 36 of the poorest countries in the world are in Africa.

Some 80% of the African Development Bank’s staff are themselves African, including very distinguished former senior Ministers from those countries. Its particular expertise is in both infrastructure and regional work between different countries. We have a new opportunity, working with the African Development Bank, and we believe that DFID can play an important role with the bank in convening the flows of new capital into Africa. There is a big push to get from the current billions of pounds of investment going into Africa to the potential trillions that could come in from the private sectors of China, India and the City of London.

The challenge, of course, is around the rules for the loans. There have been examples—Mozambique is probably the most flagrant—of private sector loans going into national Governments without proper concern or regulation. The African Development Bank is the perfect partner, we believe, for DFID to work with in trying for a really good multinational understanding as to how private sector flows, and in particular flows from new donors, can go into African countries without creating a new crisis of heavily indebted poor countries.

Although £460 million is a substantial amount of money, it is a 24% reduction on the amount that we gave at the previous replenishment. That represents some of our existing concerns about the African Development Bank. Perhaps I shall be able to expand in detail on some of those concerns, and how we might address them, in response to questions from right hon. and hon. Members; they will have seen them set out in the multilateral development review.

[Gareth Thomas]

Why does not the Minister expand on his concerns now? Do they relate to significant levels of corruption in the African Development Bank, or some other lack of sufficient rigour in its internal processes?

[Rory Stewart]

I should be delighted to expand on that now, but the shadow Minister has questions about it and I agreed with her that I would give the more detailed answers in responding to her speech.

Essentially, six areas have been identified, through the multilateral development review, in which the African Development Bank requires improvement. The first is in its delivery programme; we feel that there have been substantial delays in the processing of key bits of paperwork, so we have set a series of time limits. I will perhaps provide more details on those targets in response to the shadow Minister.

The second area is efficiency and value for money. That is particularly about keeping administrative costs below 2.5%. The third is to do with recruitment, and we have set recruitment targets. Along with the movement of the headquarters from Tunis to Abidjan, there has been a recruitment crisis. The fourth area is anti-corruption, including the processing of anti-corruption claims and ensuring that 75% of those are complete within a year. The final two areas of concern relate to countries in transition—making sure that the country offices are properly staffed, and that a duty of care for staff in those offices is observed.

[Rory Stewart]

I think the first thing is to set things in context. The African Development Bank scored well in the multilateral development review; it was in the top third of our assessment of beneficiary partners and implementing partners. That means that we would not think it appropriate in its case to set aside money on a performance basis. We think we struck the right balance by reducing the overall amount, agreeing key performance indicators, and managing through the normal process.

The basic answer to my right hon. Friend’s question is that the money will be transferred in a single amount, and our concerns about performance are reflected in the performance indicator agreement and the reduced total amount.

[Gareth Thomas]

Further to the question of the right hon. Member for East Devon, why did not the Minister decide to make some of the money conditional? Given the scale of his concerns, he might have said that £50 million of the £460 million was conditional on the bank’s meeting the objectives, or making sufficient progress with them. Surely holding back some money would be much more effective than a bit of sweet-talking in a committee, or over the phone to the head of the bank or its officials in-country.

[Rory Stewart]

I agree, and it is indeed a distinguished predecessor of mine who is mounting this barrage of questions against me.

[Gareth Thomas]

I have asked one or two questions.

[Rory Stewart]

Perhaps if the hon. Gentleman did not interrupt I could answer him more clearly. The answer is that we need to distinguish clearly between two separate things. One is performance indicators; I understood my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon to be raising that question. The other is the question of contribution payment schedules.

As to performance indicators, in banks with poorer performance—the Caribbean Development Bank would be an example—we would indeed, out of the £18 million allocated, set £4.5 million as a performance reward. However, in the case of the African Development Bank, the tranche payment allows us to hold back 25% of the 2018 payment. If it did not meet the performance indicators, that 25% would not be delivered. It is therefore a question of performance schedules rather than performance indicators.

I move on to the Asian Development Bank and the second of the statutory instruments. The amount proposed to go to the Asian Development Bank is £110 million. That bank is, of course, a larger institution than the African Development Bank, so right hon. and hon. Members may be surprised that we are giving it a smaller amount of money. The answer, of course, is that because of the development of Asian countries and DFID’s focus on lower income countries, most of which tend to be in Africa, we end up giving more to the facilities of the African Development Bank. These are concessional loan facilities, designed to work in poorer countries.

We have many fewer concerns with the Asian Development Bank than with the African Development Bank. The Asian Development Bank performed extremely well in the multilateral development review—it was right up there with the World Bank. Questions could be raised about some areas of its programme, but they are not directly relevant to the concessional loan financing that we are providing. We might have a chance to discuss them later.

That brings me to the smallest and perhaps most controversial element of our concessional loan finance, which is to the Caribbean Development Bank. We approach that bank with a degree of caution, but it is still an institution that we want to support and keep alive because it has a particular niche speciality in smaller island states. In particular, it will be our key partner through its main balance sheet in working through vital reconstruction after the hurricanes in places such as the British Virgin Islands and Anguilla, and, through the concessional funds, on the Leeward Islands and Montserrat. We believe we are justified in giving a small amount of money—relatively small compared with the other funds—of £18 million to the bank, to focus on its particular areas of expertise. However, as I said, we have laid aside £4.5 million out of that £18 million as a performance incentive. Only £13.5 million will be disbursed immediately, with £4.5 million to be held back to ensure that the bank delivers against our targets.

The targets, set out in the Secretary of State’s letter to the Caribbean Development Bank, are: publishing project information to international aid transparency initiative standards; 100,000 beneficiaries—100,000 students at school; and that project completion reports are completed at 90% within two years.

With that, I commend the orders to the Committee. I look forward to a longer discussion in response to speeches from the shadow Minister and other right hon and hon. Members.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Thomas]

I would like to follow up some of the interventions that I made earlier. It would be good to hear from the Minister some examples of projects that he has discussed with his officials that have given him continued confidence in the work of the three multilateral development banks. I express, in passing, disappointment that we have not had the opportunity to consider each of the orders separately. Certainly in the past that has been the practice, but a decision has been made and I accept that decision.

[Rory Stewart]

I stand to be corrected by you, Mr Owen, but I believe that we were offered that chance and the Committee made its decision. We would have been very happy to consider the orders separately, had the hon. Member for City of Durham wished to do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

The Minister is correct.

[Gareth Thomas]

I am suitably chastised by the Minister and the Committee; I should have been awake at that point. There has, though, been a long-running concern on both sides of the House about corruption, and it would be good to hear a little more about what has given the Minister confidence that corruption or the concern about the potential for corruption is being properly addressed by all three banks.

My last point is linked to Brexit. When we leave the European Union, we will presumably be withdrawing from the European development efforts. As I understand it, the Minister and the rest of the current Government remain committed to the 0.7% target being maintained, so one would think, if money is being pulled back from the European development efforts, that the Minister will need to look at multilateral development banks as a potential place for increasing spending further down the line, unless it is all going to go to the World Bank or one or two of the other multilateral development bank institutions.

As I understand it, the current Government do not want to increase the number of countries in which we have a direct presence and footfall and our own individual development programmes, so it would be good to hear from the Minister how he sees the future relationship between the UK and the multilateral development banks after we have withdrawn from the European development efforts. It is a significant sum of money that we are putting in and a significant signal of confidence, notwithstanding the Minister’s concerns, that we are giving the multilateral development banks. They are potentially likely to be tools for development spending that we will have to use even more going forward, so it would be good to hear how the Minister thinks we will spend our money post Brexit and whether these banks will see bigger tranches of money coming to them.

Sri Lanka: Human Rights

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Friday 4th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to the Speaker for selecting this topic for debate, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) for being in her place. It is a particular pleasure to see the Minister for Europe and the Americas, who has successfully returned to the Front Bench. I look forward to his particularly provocative personality helping to shake up the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s handling of this matter.

Amnesty International, presenting to the UN Human Rights Council on 15 September, said:

“When Sri Lanka co-sponsored UN Human Rights Council Resolution 30/1 in October 2015, among the commitments made were initiatives to account for enforced disappearances.”

It went on to say that the UN’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances

“has transmitted more than 12,000 complaints to Sri Lanka. Although the second highest in the world, these represent only the ‘tip of the iceberg.’ In May, the Sri Lankan government acknowledged receiving at least 65,000 complaints of enforced disappearances since 1995. ”

That is 65,000 people who have disappeared in 30 years. The majority of them, though not all, are Tamil. All 65,000 had families and loved ones who are grieving, who have no closure and who, certainly at the moment, have little hope of any justice.

I am pleased to say that I have a significant number of Sinhalese and Sri Lankan Muslim constituents, as well as the highest number of Tamil constituents of any MP in the UK. Some of the disappeared have relatives living in my constituency. It is their anger and demand for justice that I bring once again to this great House.

The Foreign Office has fought for the disappeared and their relatives with all the energy of a wet dishcloth. Little obvious effort goes into holding the Sri Lankan Government’s feet to the fire, so that they deliver meaningful reform and prevent further human rights abuses, never mind beginning to put right previous abuses. From time to time, it is true that new commitments are made, or a new Government come in, or there are new Sri Lankan Ministers promising to work with the international community to improve human rights. Very occasionally, the odd case gets resolved, but on the ground in Sri Lanka, the story is one of continuing impunity for human rights abusers. Ministers here, I gently suggest, have simply not done enough in recent times to challenge that culture. There is a sense that the Foreign Office either does not want to rock the boat in Sri Lanka, or does not want to put in the diplomatic effort to keep the new Sri Lankan Government under pressure to deliver.

I have visited Sri Lanka twice. The first time was as a Back-Bench MP in October 2001, if I remember rightly, when a ceasefire was in place, and there were serious negotiations under way between the Government and the Tamil Tigers about what a peace settlement might look like. I went again as a Minister in July 2005 after the terrible tsunami, but by then the conflict was under way again, with targeted assassinations by paramilitaries taking place and the language of confrontation beginning to ratchet up. Since that time, as a Minister when Labour was in government and since we have been in opposition, I have continued to raise a series of human rights abuses, both through constituency correspondence and by taking part in debates in this House.

I am told that the situation on the ground in the north and east is basically calm. Tamils from other countries can visit and are not routinely stopped any longer by the military or the police. That does not mean, however, that we should forget the terrible events that have taken place in Sri Lanka in recent times. The Sri Lankan military conflict ended in May 2009 after almost a quarter of a century of conflict, with an estimated 100,000 people losing their lives. In the final months few independent observers—certainly, no one from the international media—were able to get close to the fighting, allowing terrible abuses to take place, according to the witness testimony collected by highly credible international human rights organisations.

Murder, disappearances, sexual violence, the use of child soldiers, the use of civilians as human shields and the bombing of hospitals have all been chronicled by witnesses. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) has previously noted, many at the very top of Sri Lankan society, then Ministers, military leaders, figures in the judiciary and civil society, are suspected of being complicit in some of the atrocities that took place.

Inevitably, the Rajapaksa Government were always unlikely to offer a truth and justice process or one that encouraged reconciliation between the different communities of the island of Sri Lanka. So when the Rajapaksa Government were defeated by President Sirisena and his Administration, it seemed like a genuine moment for optimism about Sri Lanka’s future. Particularly encouraging was the new Sri Lankan Government’s willingness to co-sponsor a resolution to the UN Human Rights Council in October last year, alongside the UK, the US and other countries.

The resolution—a significant step away from the international community’s previous support for a full independent inquiry into allegations of war crimes at the end of the conflict and other allegations of human rights abuses levelled at both sides—nevertheless called for measures to advance accountability, reconciliation, human rights and the rule of law. Crucially, it called for international involvement in the prosecution of alleged war crimes and the establishment of a special court

“integrating international judges, prosecutors, lawyers and investigators”

with an independent Sri Lankan investigative and prosecuting body.

Twelve months on since that resolution was passed, with strong UK Government support and with that key and fundamental element contained in it, it is worth considering where the process stands today. There were, it is true, other elements to the resolution, which I will come back to. On the involvement of international judges and the establishment of a special court, there has been absolutely no progress to date. There have been a series of worrying public statements from the President and the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, stating that the judicial process will have no international involvement at all.

What, then, has been Britain’s reaction? I look forward to hearing from the Minister on this point in particular. Has Britain offered any judges to a special court that might be created in Sri Lanka? My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) received a very interesting answer to his written question to the then Home Secretary, now the Prime Minister, on 6 June. The then Home Secretary made it clear that she—and by implication her officials—had made no representations on or offers of help and so on with involving international judges and prosecutors in prosecutions for war crimes in Sri Lanka. In September this year the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, visited Sri Lanka and reiterated his support for international judicial participation in the special court. I ask the Minister gently why Britain has not done more to encourage delivery of that special court with that international judicial co-operation.

The resolution passed 12 months ago also approved the creation of a truth commission and of offices on reparations and missing persons. In May, to be fair to the Sri Lankan Government, an Office of Missing Persons was created, and in August the necessary law was passed by the Sri Lankan Parliament. It would be helpful to hear the Minister’s assessment of the finances and personnel of this new office, and of whether it has the political support necessary to really make a difference.

The Sri Lankan Government have also allowed visits by the UN’s working group on enforced or voluntary disappearances, the special rapporteur on torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment, and the special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers. The UN human rights commissioner acknowledged the access given to the aforementioned UN organisations, but went on to note with concern the lack of transparency in negotiations over a truth and reconciliation commission and a special court. Again, perhaps the Minister could explain what he thinks is going on. Will there be a truth and reconciliation commission, and when might that body begins work?

When, too, might we expect the catch-all Prevention of Terrorism Act, or PTA, to be lifted? I understand that the Sri Lankan Government have agreed to that, but, again, they have given no time commitment. Human Rights Watch described the PTA as the legislation used to facilitate thousands of human rights abuses over the years, including torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. It goes on to argue that the law has been used since 2009 to detain and torture people suspected of links to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, including forcibly returned asylum seekers. Indeed, I have had complaints from residents in my constituency of visits to Sri Lanka resulting in arrest and, on at least one occasion, torture.

Human Rights Watch notes that many instances of torture, sexual violence and other ill-treatment occurred in the Criminal Investigation Department and Terrorist Investigation Division offices in Colombo, while others occurred in unofficial places of detention. In addition, evidence in court has confirmed that the navy operated secret detention camps in Colombo and Trincomalee, where detainees were allegedly tortured and killed.

Even now, it is not clear exactly how many are held, or where, under the PTA. It is true that, 12 months ago, the Government announced a plan to deal with the Tamil detainees held under the PTA, with some released on bail, others sent for supposed rehabilitation, and the rest set to be charged. Can the Minister tell us today or in writing whether he has had discussions about the timing of any replacement for the PTA, whether he is confident that a full list of the Tamils detained under the PTA has been made public, and whether family members have been informed?

The remarkable people in Sri Lanka who champion human rights—for example, in the organisation Right To Life—continue to report harassment, police and military surveillance, and, on occasion, anonymous death threats. However, it is the impunity for previous human rights abuses that stands out as the single most telling indication that change in Sri Lanka is not happening anything like fast enough. Cases include the January 2006 extrajudicial execution of five students in Trincomalee by security personnel; the killing of 17 aid workers with the French organisation Action Contre La Faim in Muttur in August of the same year; the January 2009 murder of Sri Lanka’s most famous newspaper editor at the time, the Sinhalese Lasantha Wickrematunge; and the disappearances of political activists Lalith Weeraraj and Kugan Muruganandan in Jaffna in 2011. Those cases are noteworthy for the profile they had at the time and since, and for the lack of progress in the investigations.

Lastly, let me turn to the presence of the military in the north and the east of Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan Government agreed in the Human Rights Council resolution last year that it would accelerate the return of land to its rightful owners. The organisation Freedom House has suggested that the military still occupied 44,000 acres of Tamil-owned land in 2015. The Sri Lankan Centre for Policy Alternatives reported in March that 13,000 acres of land in the Northern Province alone continue to be occupied. Other reports suggest that the military has returned some, but far from all, the land it seized. It is far from clear from public statements whether all the land will be returned to its rightful owners. Again, it would be helpful to hear the Minister’s assessment. The military’s presence in the north and east is all-pervasive, with many ordinary businesses such as tourist resorts, and even shops selling basic goods, controlled by the armed forces. Economic development, particularly Tamil-owned economic development, lags far behind that in other areas of the country.

Sri Lanka is one of the most beautiful islands in the world—a point often made to me when I attend cross-community events in my constituency—but it has one of the ugliest of recent histories. Those who continue to be victims of human rights abuses in Sri Lanka have few people to turn to. Britain has a particularly heavy responsibility to take, given our previous history with Sri Lanka and our commitment to international human rights. In the end, there will not be the type of peace that offers real long-term security, and the chance for all communities to live together, unless there is a sustained truth and reconciliation process, and human rights abuses begin to be properly dealt with. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[The Minister for Europe and the Americas (Sir Alan Duncan)]

I thank the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) for securing this debate. I commend his long-standing commitment to development, including seven years as a Minister in the Department of International Development—indeed, as my predecessor as Minister of State. He is probably one of the few Labour Ministers who did not need to leave a note for his successor saying, “There’s no money left.” As a Member representing a very large Tamil community, he has rightly been concerned by the human rights situation in Sri Lanka for many years. I also highlight the important work on human rights in Sri Lanka of the other members of the all-party parliamentary group on Tamils.

I do not think we need to replay the heart-wrenching history of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war in detail today. We all understand that that decades-long conflict was a painful and traumatic period for people across the island. Many tens of thousands died. We understand too that although the civil war may have ended in 2009, the reconciliation process never ends. You will be familiar, Madam Deputy Speaker, with some of the concerns set out in this House on previous occasions, including about the continued military presence in the north and east of Sri Lanka, the credibility and independence of future judicial processes, and the need for international involvement to support the Sri Lankan Government in fulfilling their commitments. The Government recognise that the Sri Lankan Government face very significant challenges in order to address the legacy of the conflict, and that doing so will require strong leadership from all parties. We will give support where we can. We should also, however, recognise the progress that has already been achieved, particularly under the current Sri Lankan Government.

The Government of Sri Lanka co-sponsored Human Rights Council resolution 30/01 in October last year. This was a historic moment, because it set the country on an ambitious course to promote reconciliation, accountability, and human rights, and to address the legacy of its civil war. At the Human Rights Council in June this year, High Commissioner Zeid recognised the progress that Sri Lanka has made against resolution 30/01. That progress includes increased engagement with the UN, legislation on an office of missing persons, ratification of the convention on enforced disappearances, the start of a process of constitutional reform, and an improved environment for civil society and human rights defenders. I acknowledge the hon. Gentleman’s strength of feeling on the question of disappearances. Specifically on that point, which I sense was his most important, the Sri Lankan Government have enacted legislation on missing persons and ratified the convention on enforced disappearances. That is progress but the key now is implementation, which is not just about passing the law.

We continue to make those points to Government of Sri Lanka and the legislation to establish the Office of Missing Persons has just been passed. Therefore, we are still making an assessment of the office’s finances and personnel. High Commissioner Zeid also noted that more needed to be done and he called for a comprehensive strategy to deliver further progress. The Government share this assessment.

We do not underestimate the challenges of dealing with the legacy of a 30-year conflict. Actually, we welcome the determination of the Government of Sri Lanka to face up to these challenges and we will continue to encourage and support them to implement resolution 30/01 in full.

The Minister of State in the Foreign Office, my right hon. and noble Friend the Baroness Anelay of St Johns, will visit Sri Lanka next week. She will go to Colombo and Jaffna, and she will discuss these issues and many others with the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, as well as the leader of the Tamil National Alliance and other members of the Government, opposition and civil society. I undertake to ensure that she possesses a copy of the speech that the hon. Gentleman has delivered today, so that all the issues that he has raised in the House will be fully familiar to her on the occasion of her visit. Moreover, I am pleased to confirm that she will also meet recent returnees to land that has been cleared of mines by the HALO Trust, thanks to UK Government funding.

There are several areas where more action is required if the Government of Sri Lanka are to fulfil all the commitments that they have made. The particular priorities that I will highlight, as the hon. Gentleman has already done today, are constitutional reform, land returns and security issues.

The devolution of political authority, through constitutional reform that protects the rights of all Sri Lankans, is an essential foundation for future prosperity and stability. I am encouraged by the inclusive consultation process that has been undertaken and I urge all parties to work together to deliver a revised constitution that lays the foundations for inclusive and fair governance.

More land returns are also essential, both to build trust and to allow those who have been displaced to return to their land. It is encouraging that land is being released, including an area in Jaffna last month. I hope the Government of Sri Lanka will return all private land that is still in military hands to its civilian owners.

Land releases on their own are not enough; they must be accompanied by adequate housing and other support for resettled communities. That is why the UK continues to support de-mining, housing and resettlement programmes through bilateral and multilateral funding. The Government of Sri Lanka should also tackle the issue of military involvement in civilian activity, which is constraining employment opportunities, especially in the north and east of the country.

We continue to encourage security sector reform in Sri Lanka. We urge the Government to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act and to replace it with counter-terrorism laws that comply with international human rights standards. We also urge them to expedite the cases of those detained without charge under that act.

Sexual and gender-based violence and torture must also be addressed. We raise any credible reports of abuses with the Government of Sri Lanka and encourage them to investigate such reports fully. We also fund training programmes for the Sri Lankan police, and other measures to combat and eliminate torture.

[Mr Thomas]

May I ask the Minister, in the remaining minutes of his interesting response to my speech, to comment on the establishment—or not—of the special court, which was one of the key elements of resolution 30/01? In particular, can he say whether international judges might, in the end, still be participants in that court?

[Sir Alan Duncan]

I can answer that question straight away by saying that we have not yet offered any UK judges to the special court, because it has not yet been set up. We will consider UK support in due course and we will continue to press the Sri Lankans to do that as quickly as possible.

We have also renewed defence engagement with Sri Lanka, in recognition of the important role that the armed forces have to play in addressing the crucial issues of reconciliation, accountability and human rights.

As well as addressing those human rights issues, Sri Lanka also faces difficult economic pressure. An improving economy would also help the process of peace. Financial and economic stability will help secure investment, development and prosperity for all provinces and all ethnicities. The UK will continue to work with the Government of Sri Lanka to improve the business environment, in particular by strengthening anti-corruption bodies.

We also strongly encourage the Government to address all issues identified by the EU as prerequisites to the reinstatement of the generalised scheme of preference plus. That reinstatement would provide a welcome economic boost by removing duties on exports to the EU.

We welcome the steps taken so far by the Sri Lankan Government to meet their human rights commitments. Progress on that agenda, and in other areas, will be vital to ensuring lasting reconciliation. That will require courageous and determined leadership, not only from the Government, but from political actors and civil society right across the country and, indeed, the diaspora.

The UK continues to encourage and support Sri Lanka to implement its human rights commitments in full. I am very proud of the United Kingdom’s role. We will continue to support Sri Lanka as it takes further steps towards securing peace, reconciliation and prosperity for all Sri Lankans. Once again, may I commend the hon. Gentleman for ensuring that those important issues are heard in this House?

Question put and agreed to.

Sri Lanka: Human Rights

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention. That is the specific issue that I want to spend some time addressing this afternoon, particularly international involvement in the prosecution of alleged war crimes from the civil war.

I am delighted to see so many members of the all-party parliamentary group here this afternoon, but I want to pay particular tribute to our chair, the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry), who would be here were it not for important constituency engagements. He has worked hard in his first year in office to champion the issues that I will be discussing this afternoon.

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I echo the praise for my hon. Friend’s interest in this importance matter. My constituency also has one of the largest populations of Tamils, who are particularly concerned about the fact that the north and east of Sri Lanka remain heavily militarised. It appears that the Sri Lankan Government still have no serious plan to facilitate the return home of the largely Tamils and Muslims who have been displaced by the conflict.

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the ongoing challenges. I will begin by talking about the history of the Sri Lankan civil war, but it is important to remember this afternoon that there are ongoing issues, such as human rights abuses, that need to be taken seriously by the international community and this House.

Persecution of Religious Minorities: Pakistan

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Siobhain McDonagh]

I completely agree with the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White). It is a thriving, well-educated community that has much to give Pakistan, and it will do so if given the freedom and opportunity.

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Although the debate is rightly focusing on the persecution of the Ahmadis in Pakistan, will my hon. Friend find a way to raise with the Minister the concerns that the Ahmadiyya community has about the way it is treated in Bulgaria and Indonesia, where similar problems exist, albeit not on the same scale as in Pakistan?

--- Later in debate ---

[Siobhain McDonagh]

The community activities of the Ahmadiyya community in the UK are extensive, and I am sure that every Member here will have a different example of something that it has done for their own and other communities.

In the past few years, hundreds of Ahmadis have been murdered on the grounds of their faith. Eleven were murdered in 2014 alone. This year, a vigilante mob targeted an Ahmadi family in Gujranwala, setting their home alight and killing three family members: a grandmother and her two little grandchildren. No arrests have been made, and Pakistani news channels refused to air bulletins about the incident. It is quite shocking to think that the persecution the community faces is enshrined in Pakistani law.

It is a criminal offence for an Ahmadi to call themselves Muslim, refer to their faith as Islam, call their place of worship a mosque, or say the Islamic greeting, “Peace be upon you”. That is punishable by imprisonment, a fine or even death. Those laws are a clear denial of basic human rights for Ahmadi Muslims freely to profess and practise their faith without state interference or persecution. The laws specifically against Ahmadiyya Muslims also undermine the constitutional right of Pakistani citizens to practice freedom of religion. The state’s laws have emboldened other states and extremists to harass, attack and kill Ahmadis. The persecution of Ahmadiyya Muslims operates in many complex ways, as does the persecution of other religious minorities, which I hope we will explore in this debate.

Ahmadis are denied the right to vote—they are disfranchised unless they declare themselves non-Muslims. They remain the only disfranchised group in Pakistan. Indeed, the Electoral Commission of Pakistan has further institutionalised the disenfranchisement. It has decided that Ahmadis can be permitted to vote only under a separate register, and by self-identifying as a non-Muslim minority and therefore by denying their faith. While Ahmadis are registered on a separate electoral register, all other communities—whether Muslim, Sikh, Hindu or Christian—are listed on a unified joint register. The requirement of Ahmadis to deny their faith in order to vote has caused their disfranchisement from Pakistani politics for more than 30 years. Worse still, the separate Ahmadiyya electoral register is publicly available, making it much easier for extremists to target Ahmadis.

Ahmadis are also denied the basic right to a fair trial. The vast majority of the terrible offences committed against Ahmadis go unpunished. It is crucial to note that no prosecutions have been brought for any of the killings of Ahmadiyya Muslims. On top of that, Ahmadis are increasingly being charged and tried for terrorism offences. Take the elderly Ahmadi optician from Rabwah, Mr Abdul Shakoor. Mr Shakoor has been tried and convicted, and imprisoned for five years, under Pakistan’s anti-terrorism act, on false charges alleging the sale of an Ahmadiyya commentary on the Holy Koran. Pakistan’s anti-terrorism legislation was introduced to curb the rise of extreme sectarian violence in the country. It is extremely distressing to learn that that same legislation has been used to convict a 70-year-old member of one of Pakistan’s most peaceful religious communities.

Another example is Mr Tahir Mehdi Imtiaz, who is an editor of an Ahmadiyya monthly publication. Mr Imtiaz was arrested by police in March 2015 on false charges. This time, it was under Pakistan’s infamous blasphemy laws. Although the prosecution was unable to provide evidence that Mr Imtiaz had included blasphemous materials in his publications, judges in the Supreme Court of Pakistan rejected his pleas for bail prior to trial. That was because the judiciary still fear being viewed as being lenient on Ahmadis—anti-Ahmadi sentiment pervades society. To this day, almost a year since his arrest, Mr Imtiaz is still incarcerated with no prospect of bail or a trial date in sight.

Both those Ahmadi men have been arrested and imprisoned on false grounds as a result of the discrimination that is entrenched in Pakistan’s justice system. I am sure that Members will join me in hoping that the UK Government will call on the Pakistani Government to release Mr Imtiaz and Mr Shakoor immediately. Will the Minister outline what the FCO is doing on those two cases?

[Mr Gareth Thomas]

My hon. Friend rightly draws attention to the immediate responsibilities of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but given that the aid budget to Pakistan from the Department for International Development is heavy, and that DFID has many opportunities for influence too, does she not agree that there needs to be a co-ordinated, cross-Government démarche to the various levels of the Pakistani Government, both at state and federal level?

[Siobhain McDonagh]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. I was having just that discussion the other day with the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), who expressed his concern that aid is being given to Pakistan but the issues of the Ahmadiyya community are not being resolved.

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[Siobhain McDonagh]

That is certainly something that DFID should look at. I am aware of grants being threatened because textbooks that contain difficult and discriminatory messages are used.

The situation in Pakistan overspills its borders and has resulted in many Ahmadis fleeing to seek refuge. Many have fled to countries such as Thailand, where they live in extremely difficult conditions to escape the persecution that they face in Pakistan. However, the community is being let down in Thailand, too. Just last month, the Thai Government arrested and arbitrarily detained more than 45 Ahmadis and are now seeking to deport them back to Pakistan, where they will inevitably face persecution and even violence. This group includes women and very young children, some of whom have been recognised as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They are being detained in terrible conditions. This is despite the fact that Thailand has responsibilities under UN conventions. But it seems that the Thai Government have forgotten the extreme dangers that Ahmadis face if they are returned to Pakistan, a country they have fled in fear of their lives. I look forward to the Minister addressing this point and outlining what the UK Government are doing to urge Thai authorities to permit Ahmadi refugees to stay until the UNHCR completes its due process.

Within our own borders, the situation is similarly bleak. Despite overwhelming evidence demonstrating the persecution and targeted violence faced by this community in Pakistan, the UK is currently in the process of deporting Ahmadi asylum seekers. This contravenes the UK’s own guidance issued just last year. I am sure hon. Members will join me in being absolutely appalled by the Home Office seemingly accepting the terrible risks faced by Ahmadis who openly practise their faith in Pakistan. I hope that the Minister will agree that this position urgently needs to change.

At the same time as the Ahmadi community flees persecution in Pakistan, it faces more and more persecution in other nations, as the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) mentioned, in places such as Bangka, Indonesia. Just last Friday, Ahmadis in this region were forcibly evicted from their homes by the police and military authorities as a result of extremists putting pressure on local authorities. Ahmadis were given an ultimatum to either renounce their faith or be forced to leave, and the objections made by the Indonesian Home Minister against the evictions were ignored. Ahmadi families were evicted while mobs who were delighted to see them go cheered. Not only is this example distressing in itself but it is likely to trigger other such forced evictions, increasingly making Indonesian Ahmadis refugees in their own countries.

So what can be done about the terrible persecution faced by this peaceful community? In Pakistan, the situation sadly remains bleak. Despite the many ongoing human rights abuses, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif stated last month,

“I am the Prime Minister of all of you...And it is my duty to help everyone. If anyone is a victim of brutality, no matter what religion or what sect he belongs to, my duty is to help him.”

Meanwhile, article 20 of Pakistan’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion. The country is also a signatory to the UN charter of human rights, which makes it obligatory for the Government to safeguard the fundamental rights of all without any discrimination, whether it is based on religion, faith or belief, but it is clear that Pakistan is systematically failing to uphold the human rights of all its citizens.

The ongoing persecution of Ahmadi citizens undermines Pakistan’s progress and its development, and stores up huge problems for the future stability of the country. Furthermore, the state’s policies allow extremism to flourish, which threatens the security of Pakistan itself, the UK, and of course the rest of the world. What is also clear is that the international community has a moral responsibility to act and apply pressure on Pakistan to abide by international conventions and treaties in order to uphold the human rights of all.

I hope that this debate will inspire the Minister to reflect on the UK’s stance on those issues. The Government must raise the issues of corruption and anti-Ahmadi laws, which allow extremists to target and murder Ahmadis. They should put pressure on Pakistan to rid itself of its discriminatory anti-Ahmadi laws, and encourage the Pakistani Government to grant the peaceful Ahmadi community the right to worship, the right to justice and a fair trial, and the right to practise their religion without fear of persecution, discrimination or violence.

[Mr Gareth Thomas]

My hon. Friend is rightly focusing on the difficulties relating to the Ahmadis’ human rights in Pakistan, but many other religious minorities in Pakistan are under the same pressure. Christians, Hindus and other Islamic groups also face persecution, which is clearly tolerated at the federal state level, where the Pakistani authorities also need to take action.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

I completely agree, and I hope that other hon. Members will talk about the problems that other religious groups in Pakistan face.

The Government should be vocal in addressing the situation of the Ahmadi communities in Thailand and Indonesia. They should think about how to guarantee that UK taxpayers’ money will not be used to promote intolerance and extremism in Pakistan. Finally, they should look closely at the UK’s borders and the unfairness of our asylum processes, which are failing Ahmadi asylum seekers who have fled violence and persecution and forcing them back to Pakistan.

Ahmadi Muslims are peaceful and peace-loving, and they give so much to their communities. I am proud that the Borough of Merton is the UK and worldwide headquarters of the Ahmadi Muslim community, which makes an incredible contribution to the richness and diversity of our area. The Baitul Futuh mosque in Morden is the largest mosque in western Europe. The community’s impact on this country is inestimable. It has raised more than £2 million for British charities and makes regular collections for the Royal British Legion’s poppy appeal. It uses its mosques as blood donation centres and has raised 1,000 units of blood in the past year. It feeds 30,000 homeless people each year and has distributed the peaceful teachings of Islam to 5 million UK homes.

Hon. Members should be proud to represent constituencies with an Ahmadi population. We in this House have a responsibility to do all we can do to give the persecution of Ahmadi Muslims the international visibility it deserves. I hope this debate will inspire the Minister to take meaningful action to ensure that the UK plays its part in promoting freedom of religion in Pakistan and across the world.

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[Paul Scully]

I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman. Hatred and persecution certainly have no place here in the UK. That is why we need to lead from the front and make that case to the Government and other organisations in Pakistan, as well as around the world. The point is well made.

[Mr Gareth Thomas]

In a spirit of north and south London solidarity, does the hon. Gentleman agree that another thing that the Foreign Office could do is to raise with Bulgaria the discrimination that takes place against Ahmadis there? Bulgaria is a key European Union ally and one with which we ought to have good contacts, so we could discuss the issue repeatedly until progress happens and the discrimination ends.

[Mr Andrew Turner (in the Chair)]

We are getting rather long interventions, which we should not be.

Draft Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (Immunities and Privileges) Order 2015

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2015 General Committees

[James Duddridge]

I could not agree more. Before coming to this place, my hon. Friend established a great tradition of working in that area, and he continues to leverage his expertise as a member of all-party parliamentary groups. I urge him to continue to do that, through his involvement with the fledgling development bank.

The order is part of the UK’s ratification process, and provides the privileges and immunities that will enable the bank to function as an international organisation in this country. It is part of the requirements laid out in the articles of agreement signed by the UK Treasury’s Commercial Secretary in June and is in line with the requirements of other international organisations of which we are a member.

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I apologise for the discourtesy of missing the Minister’s opening remarks. He mentioned other multilateral development banks. How does he see the new bank operating with the Asian Development Bank? One would think, instinctively, that there was some overlap or, if not, that there would be some sort of memorandum of understanding between the two. Does the Minister envisage that?

[James Duddridge]

I certainly envisage their working closely together, but equally closely with other international development banks, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the African Development Bank and, to a lesser degree, the World Bank, which has a slightly different context and structure in relation to the order. There are plenty of development opportunities in the region and beyond, and I encourage all development banks and all Development Ministers across the world to work together. That is where the greatest rewards are, rather than in operating solely individually. Fundamentally, it is about operating collectively.

[Mr Thomas]

The Minister is aware that Mr Jin Liqun was appointed as the secretary-general of the multilateral interim secretariat of the new bank. Was Britain consulted on the appointment? Is it a genuinely interim one and, if so, will Britain be involved in the interviews for the permanent head of the bank?

[James Duddridge]

I cannot speak for the appointment process as part of the draft order. I am just setting out the basis on which those people will be employed. However, I am more than happy to look at the matter, if it is exercising the hon. Gentleman—as it appears to be doing. In relation to the draft order, I have made the comments that I wish to make and I therefore commend it to the Committee.

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[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes, as always.

I am delighted to see colleagues with vast experience of international development in Committee—my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West and the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield, who was a distinguished Secretary of State. I hope that they will take the chance to talk about the important question of immunities and privileges as far as it extends to the broader remit of what China is trying to achieve in its foreign policy goals, which we appear to be swallowing, sometimes without taking too much time to see what it is that we are swallowing.

Immunities and privileges are important in that regard. I do not want us to become the Chancellor’s version of an eastern powerhouse. We will be putting about £2 billion into the bank. Will there be a return domestically, in the countries that will benefit from the projects, and in our own UK economy? Will we get representation? Will the immunities and privileges in the draft statutory instrument be sufficient to safeguard the British interest? That is my anxiety about the helter-skelter speed at which some things are being done politically—though we all wish the Chancellor well, because we all wish Britain well when we enter such engagements—and at the parliamentary level. You know better than anyone, Mr Gapes, that such things need proper, careful, steady scrutiny. We ought sometimes perhaps to take a leaf out of the Chinese book. If things took several years to come to fruition, we would be able to understand them in much more depth. Many people, even in the House, are totally unaware of what the bank will do and how it will fit with existing institutions. If we asked the man and the woman in the street about the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, they would not have a clue what we were talking about, yet we are going to cast £2 billion into that bank.

One of the good things, and one reason why I am interested in hearing the former Secretary of State’s comments, is that the institution is still a moveable feast. We have seen a number of changes, even in the past six months, in the Chinese position, in respect of, for example, the representation and stakeholding, and what the functions of such an investment bank might be. I wonder whether the former Secretary of State in his private moments, or perhaps even in a pubic moment today, might ask about the impact of the bank, and of Chinese economic and foreign policy, on our overall strategy for international development and for helping people in difficulties—abroad, of course, but also in our own country. I will not stray into nuclear power or the demise of the steel industry because you would rightly call me to order, Mr Gapes.

The other people who have raised warning flags are our good allies across the water, in the United States. They have asked a number of questions and we have consequently seen movement on the Chinese side. The Chinese have not said, “No, we’re not going to listen. It’s this or nothing else.” In such a negotiation, it is wise to play it long and keep a number of other things on the table. We have to develop international institutions, particularly with our friends and partners in China and India, but we need to ensure, rather like the Prime Minister is trying to do in Brussels, that the shopping list is not a closed one but one that can benefit from interaction and negotiation.

Over several months, the United States has, in an unusual way, flagged up rather clearly—in terms of our international friendship—some of its anxieties about our being a little too eager to chase after the Chinese dragon and accommodate its demands rather than to hold out and strike a tougher dealer. It is not good enough to say, “We’re going to let China come in. We’re going to trade with China.” We need to be clear about what that means. It has implications for the immunities and privileges we are talking about. For example, are the privileges and immunities granted to staff members of the World Bank identical to those granted by the order? Are we duplicating the facilities of the World Bank and many other international institutions? Was the establishment of the institution an attempt to create a counterpart to the World Bank? Perhaps we have seen that one off for the moment, but I do not get the sense that the Government are particularly clear about what they wish to do in that regard.

Regarding the immunities granted to people who will serve the institution, we also need to be clear that they do not give carte blanche to operate exploitative relationships, particularly with people who endure difficult working conditions. There is a lobby today about the Trade Union Bill. There may well be places where there are no trade unions and where workers are exploited, and we need to ensure that the people who run the institution take that into account. Who are those people? Are they representative? Will they give infrastructure resource to other countries to help them to develop with one hand, while encouraging practices that we would all condemn with the other hand? The people at the top of the organisation need to be aware of and clear about the need to develop these institutions on a much fairer basis.

[Mr Thomas]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, not least because the history of Chinese infrastructure aid to many developing countries, important as it has undoubtedly been, has often involved Chinese labourers effectively being imported into the country where the infrastructure is being built as a quid pro quo for the investment. Surely we need to ensure that that cannot be achieved as part of the investment we are potentially committing to this bank.

[Mr Allen]

That is why this particular statutory instrument is very important. The shareholders, stakeholders and staff of this institution who are going to enjoy the immunities and privileges being granted to them by this statutory instrument need to be on full alert that this is not an attempt to just co-operate and to maximise the exploitation of the people working in various parts of Asia covered by the institution.

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[Mr Thomas]

The people of Harrow West have always been interested in multilateral development banks, and they will certainly be interested in this new addition to the family. I want to pick up where my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North left off. One recognises the global Realpolitik that has clearly influenced the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for contributing to this new bank, but one hopes that the Minister and his colleagues in the Department for International Development will, as my hon. Friend suggested, start to ask much tougher questions than those that the Minister suggested in the part of his opening remarks that I was able to hear are being asked.

Multilateral development banks have always been a cosy club. The Americans always get to pick the head of the World Bank; the Europeans always get to pick the head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; and it is usually a Japanese national who gets chosen to be the head of the Asian Development Bank. There is therefore a sense that this new multilateral development bank is on the horizon partly because the Chinese want their own bank that they can control. That suspicion is fed by the appointment of Mr Jin Liqun, who seems to be the de facto chief executive of the new bank. I look to the Minister to give a fuller answer on whether he is there for a short or a long period, whether there will be interviews and whether Britain will be on the interview panel.

There is usually a series of vice-presidents to handle particular parts of a multilateral development bank’s portfolio. It would be good to hear a bit more about the structure of the proposed bank. Will there be a series of vice-presidents? Which countries does the Minister expect will provide the heads of the bank? Is this perhaps an opportunity for another Member from Nottingham to take up a position in the international development world? Is there a chance for Britain to hold one of the vice-presidencies of the new bank, given our significant contribution?

On staffing, given the scale of the spending that this multilateral development bank will presumably be able to make—very large sums of money will be committed to very large infrastructure projects—what will be the governance arrangements for those projects? Will Britain have a dedicated official and a team to support them, as we do at the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, who will be able to go through the fine print of each proposed investment and pick through whether the environmental and social safeguards that the bank eventually signs up to are met in full?

Will there be a process by which Britain and others can raise human rights concerns, if there are any, about particular infrastructure projects? I ask that in the context of Sri Lanka, a country that certainly needs significant multilateral investment—the Chinese have been showing considerable interest in providing that—but where significant human rights concerns remain, particularly in the north and the east. It would be a tragedy if British investment in the new bank was inadvertently to reinforce through infrastructure spending the denial of human rights to particular groups in Sri Lanka.

[Mr Allen]

I am not sure whether my hon. Friend was seeking to nominate me for some sort of position in the bank when he mentioned a Member for Nottingham who could keep an eye on things, but modesty would forbid me from accepting such a role. There is a Member of Parliament for Nottinghamshire—the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield—who is eminently qualified to defend the interests of working people, as he ably did when he was the Secretary of State for International Development. He is too modest to get to his feet and acknowledge that, but he is in the Committee. Perhaps the Minister might think carefully about how we safeguard people in that position, because we have seen recently—

[Mr Allen]

We do not want to repeat what has happened with the Saudi Arabian republic looking after human rights and getting a soft job, when there are able people who can do that work on our behalf.

[Mr Thomas]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend pointing out to me that Sutton Coldfield is slightly further away from Nottingham than I had initially realised. Being from London, we are sometimes a bit hazy about the distances between constituencies north of Watford. Indeed, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield might be an excellent potential vice-president if the Foreign Office was willing to fight for him to get such a post. Perhaps the first thing would be to know whether Britain will have a chance of nominating one of the deputies or vice-presidents to that role.

As I was alluding to, some of the commentary about the new bank has pointed out that its byelaws require a 75% super-majority for major decisions. That will effectively give China a de facto veto on personnel and policy decisions. It would be helpful to know whether that commentary, which was issued at the end of June this year, is still accurate, or whether there have been changes to the byelaws. It would be a concern if we were simply to pump money into the organisation with the Chinese having a veto over all the big decisions, particularly if we had significant concerns about spending going forward.

The previous Labour Government were pushing for reform of the processes for appointing the heads of multilateral development banks. I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman carried on that work, but it would be good to hear from him on that subject.

The Committee and the whole House are entitled to hear what reassurance the Minister can give us on this crucial matter. Sadly, there was often little opportunity in the House to debate the work of the multilateral development banks. All too often, debate took place only when major funding decisions were being announced. Can the Minister set out whether there will be a change in that regard? Given that it is a new institution, early scrutiny on the Floor of the House might be important.

Finally, the AIIB released draft environmental and social safeguards. A series of NGOs have expressed concern about those safeguards, and it would be useful to hear from the Minister whether Britain has taken any of them up and whether there have been any reforms of and improvements to the draft guidelines.

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[James Duddridge]

I am terribly sorry to have insulted my right hon. Friend so early in my speech. I apologise profusely. He suggested that I should be working closely with the Department for International Development, which I certainly am. Today I stand here as a Foreign Office Minister with responsibility for protocol. However, I would like to work much more closely across a number of subjects with my right hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), who kindly deputised for me when I was ill for much of the last year.

I will try to deal with all the points that have been raised in this debate in broad themes. I will touch on individual points, mentioning individual Members, as and when. A number of Members brought up social and environmental issues, and the UK has been involved in discussions on those subjects from an early stage. The UK has encouraged the bank, and members of the bank, to consult widely, and Her Majesty’s Government have specifically had discussions with NGOs—those discussions will continue—on how the bank will operate and on the bank’s standards on social and environmental issues. There have not been specific discussions on the projects that the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley mentioned, but there are wide-ranging discussions encompassing all the issues, including human rights.

The hon. Member for Harrow West asked about the interim appointment. I confirm that Britain was consulted on that, and an election is expected for the full-time appointment. He probed me further on governance more generally, and I confirm that there will be 12 non- resident board members. How they will fit geographically, and the areas they will cover, are still being negotiated. Additionally, there will be a number of vice-presidents, but I remind him that a lot of these development banks have many members—in this case, there are already 57 members. However, Britain is well placed, given the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s early entry.

The policy lead will be through Her Majesty’s Treasury—this issue has been raised by a number of Members—and we will maintain a strong influence, but the exact positions both of the non-executive board and of the vice-presidents are still to be negotiated. However, I note that both in the time of the hon. Member for Harrow West and in current times we have strong experience of multilateral development, and we are well placed to assist the bank.

[Mr Thomas]

Is the Minister aware of any non-Chinese candidates for the permanent position heading the bank? Why does the Treasury have the policy lead? Given that DFID has responsibility for multilateral development banks, why has this particular bank been taken out of its control?

[James Duddridge]

The bank has not been taken out of anyone’s control. The Chancellor has been close to this work, which is perhaps why it is a Treasury lead. I have not been involved, so I am not aware of specific candidates in the longer term. As Minister with responsibility for protocol, I have looked at the governance issue in relation to immunities, privileges, reliefs and exemptions and what that might mean for different individuals.

The question of shareholding gives me an opportunity to address the super-majority. China will have the largest share capital, which translates to a voter shareholding of 26.1%, so the hon. Gentleman is right in his assertion that there is a blocking super-majority. However, the combined shareholding of non-regional members is higher than the Chinese holding, at 26.7%. In relation to the Asian Development Bank, I understand that there is an ongoing discussion about a memorandum of understanding between the two banks.

The hon. Member for East Lothian raised some concerns about the Japanese, and subsequently the hon. Member for Nottingham North raised similar issues about the US position in relation to this bank. The US was initially sceptical but it would be fair to say that its tone has softened over recent months, particularly after the recent Chinese state visit. The US acknowledged the contribution that this new bank could make. It is very much not a zero-sum arrangement. This will be a beneficial addition to the piece.

[James Duddridge]

The point of the order is to lay the foundations for the bank to operate across our jurisdiction in the UK, rather than to draw reference to where it might have other headquarters or regional headquarters.

[Mr Thomas]

With respect, the question of the hon. Member for Gloucester is perfectly reasonable. Where will the bank be headquartered? The Minister must know that. The Chancellor of the Exchequer must have agreed that as part of the agreement on our contribution.

[James Duddridge]

I cannot immediately confirm the location. However, if I am inspired later in my speech, I will clarify that point for the hon. Gentleman. Other hon. Members raised the issue of trade unions and the exploitation of workers. Specifically, labour rights have been and continue to be considered as part of the environmental and social standards that are being negotiated.

In relation to questions from the hon. Member for Nottingham North about the man in the street—clearly the people of west Harrow are better educated on multilaterals than those elsewhere—I gently suggest that perhaps the man on the street or the man on the Clapham omnibus would not know about the intricate workings of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development or the African Development Bank, which are two similar institutions that do great work.

I said that I would return to the hon. Member for Harrow West on the location of the headquarters. Evidently, the location has already been decided to be Beijing.

The hon. Member for Nottingham North asked about the speed at which we should move. We have moved quickly and we did that deliberately to co-ordinate with an opportunity. The Chancellor has been a visionary in that regard, which will be good for the region and for the UK.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the draft Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (Immunities and Privileges) Order 2015.