Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [Lords] (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Helen Goodman and Robert Courts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Helen Goodman]

Welcome to cold Committee Room 12, Mr McCabe. As we discussed this morning, clause 27 was inserted by those in another place because it was agreed that we need reviews of what is going on. Amendment 24 would extend the coverage of the reviews. At the moment, the clause proposes one question for review: “whether the regulations” relating to the sanctions

“are still appropriate for the purpose stated in them under section 1(3)”,

which is whatever purpose the sanctions have. That is absolutely fine; we agree with it and think it completely sensible, but we want to add two other things that we think should be covered by the reviews. One is the humanitarian impact, and the other is the impact of the sanctions on British citizens who are not their intended target.

Let me tell the Committee about two episodes in which the humanitarian impact of sanctions was very significant and may have made them counterproductive, because they were simply punishing poor people in the countries involved, who were not responsible for the bad behaviour of their leaders. The sanctions had horrendous negative consequences, which led to a lot of anti-western feeling.

The first example is the comprehensive, multilateral, international sanctions imposed on Iraq in August 1990 under UN Security Council resolution 661. As some of us can remember, it was after the first invasion of Kuwait. Before the sanctions, Iraq had imported roughly 70% of its food, medicine and chemicals for agriculture. Obviously, Iraq was a very wealthy country because of its oil reserves, but with trade sanctions imposed, it could not use that wealth to buy food. Some time later, in 1998, Denis Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, said:

“We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.”

UNICEF came to the view that the sanctions caused the deaths of half a million Iraqi children. That is a terrible death toll and not one that any of us can be comfortable with. Although the idea was to have sanctions instead of hot war, the toll of death and suffering for the Iraqi people was probably as bad from the sanctions as it would have been from hot war. We think that should be taken more into account.

Of course, the situation in Iraq was and is highly contested, but that is why we have tabled amendment 25, saying that the assessment must be done in accordance with the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s “Sanctions Assessment Handbook”. We are saying we should have an agreed methodology for making this assessment, because that way we are more likely to reach an agreed assessment of what the impact of sanctions is; then people can stop arguing about the facts and start considering whether sanctions are justifiable or not. We are not saying that this is the only question to be considered. We are saying the questions should be, “Does it achieve the objectives?” and “What is the humanitarian impact?”

There was another serious case a few years later—all of this happened some time ago, but it is significant none the less. In Haiti, following the military coup of 1991 and the fraudulent elections of 2000, the international community reacted by imposing sanctions. Here again the impact on ordinary citizens was devastating. By 1994, the rate of malnutrition among children under five in many health institutions had increased from 27% to more than 50%. The UNICEF view was that thousands of children died as a consequence.

Of course, both those cases involved countries with a history of bad governance, so disentangling the results of bad governance and the results of the humanitarian sanctions is not absolutely straightforward, and I am not saying that it is absolutely straightforward. Nevertheless, these cases reinforce the argument for amendment 25.

We have also proposed adding that the impact on British citizens who are not the targets of the sanctions should be taken into consideration. It is quite easy to stand back in the Chamber and say, “Oh, we think we should impose sanctions on this person or that person.” The hon. Member for Witney is nodding fiercely; I hope he is nodding at what I am saying.

[Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)]

Oh, certainly.

[Helen Goodman]

Of course, sanctions also have an impact on British commercial and economic interests, and on British commercial and economic actors. I will give the Committee a couple of examples of that.

In a more recent example, from 2014, we decided to impose sanctions against Russia after the intervention in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. One of the things that the sanctions covered was technology for oil and gas, which is obviously a very big sector in the Russian economy. SMD, a specialist engineering firm in Newcastle, makes sophisticated robots that operate on the seabed, doing the job of deep-sea divers. Those robots were banned and the chief executive of SMD—Andrew Hodgson, who I have met—highlighted the damage to his business. He said:

“Imagine we’re a 500 employee business and 20% of your business doesn’t exist, that’s 100 jobs and obviously we’ve been working hard on the technology”,

which is very modern technology. Normally, the company would have exported £20 million worth of equipment, but that business was lost, straight away. Another reason for considering the impact of sanctions on British citizens and the cost to the British economy is the possibility of counter-sanctions imposed by the person or country we are sanctioning. Russia retaliated by banning imports of agricultural and other produce from both the European Union and the United States, including mackerel from Scotland. That was not great for Scottish fishermen.

Nissan was also extremely badly affected, because the effect of the sanctions on Russia was that the rouble plummeted. Nissan had been paid for its car exports in roubles and was not hedged sufficiently to deal with a big drop in the rouble. It halted all the orders because it could not afford to take the loss, which was significant, although not as bad as if it had sold the cars at a loss.

We are pleased that the Government inserted clause 27 and that they are taking a consensual approach to the Bill—