Human Rights

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Ann Clwyd]

Thank you, Mr Chope.

I turn to the criteria for designating countries of concern, which perhaps in part will answer the question asked by the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart). I am pleased that the FCO has provided the criteria it uses to make its designations in the 2012 human rights report. I remain baffled, however, that Bahrain, given the continuing serious violations that were committed during the period that the report covers, was not added as a country of concern. I reiterate the recommendation of the Foreign Affairs Committee:

“If there is no significant progress by the start of 2014, the Government should designate Bahrain as a ‘country of concern’”.

Let us hope that the meeting held last week between Bahrain’s Crown Prince and the main opposition leaders signals the willingness of the Bahraini Government and the opposition to engage in meaningful negotiations, leading to meaningful political reform, greater political openness, fairer representation and the end of discrimination. If it does not, I suggest that it is time to get much tougher with Bahrain.

The Foreign Affairs Committee Chair mentioned deportation with assurances, which is a very important point, because the FCO seems satisfied with existing arrangements and has rejected suggestions made by our Committee to strengthen the monitoring process for people returned under those arrangements, including to Ethiopia and Algeria. I urge the FCO to look at the matter again, and remind it that a DWA agreement was also concluded with Libya during the time of Colonel Gaddafi and was seen at the time as perfectly fine. I doubt, for instance, that, as the Chair said, a domestic human rights institution in Ethiopia that is widely known to be ineffective can be trusted to monitor the well-being of those returned to Ethiopia under the agreement.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that we should be much more careful about deporting people to countries that are not signatories to the convention on torture, as a way of protecting them against that and protecting our own legal position?

[Ann Clwyd]

Yes, I absolutely agree with that observation. Indeed, I think that these arrangements are of political significance and warrant some form of parliamentary control. The non-statutory nature of the memorandums of understanding involved does not prevent parliamentary scrutiny. I would also welcome the FCO’s reporting back to Parliament annually on how effective the monitoring arrangements have been and whether any allegations of abuse have been reported to it.

Like many of my colleagues, I look forward to receiving the findings of the independent investigation being undertaken by David Anderson QC into this policy, although I wonder why it has taken so long to get that investigation off the ground.

The Foreign Affairs Committee Chair also mentioned women’s rights. I join him in commending the Foreign Secretary for taking a lead with the preventing sexual violence in conflict initiative, but I would like to know whether and how the FCO will involve more UK parliamentarians, particularly in the light of the conference to be held in London in June this year. Women’s organisations are also questioning how the preventing sexual violence initiative and the conference can galvanise support for grass-roots women’s organisations in countries of concern.

Further to the women’s rights agenda, I think that we all need to focus on how to help to support women, including women MPs and civil society more generally, in Afghanistan during and after the NATO withdrawal. Sadly, I do not believe that it is “mission accomplished”. The real gains made for women in the past decade are fragile, and women are likely to become increasingly exposed in coming years. I have seen what has happened in Iraq. I criticise the lack of ongoing support for women in Iraq who are exercising their mandates as Members of Parliament with considerable difficulties. I would like to know what precisely we are continuing to do in Iraq before we start making promises about what we will continue to do in Afghanistan.

I would like to conclude with two points. The first is my concern about growing restrictions in many countries around the world on non-violent civil society activity, including, as Amnesty highlighted recently, the proliferation of “national security” and “public order” legislation aimed at restricting the space in which civil society operates. I would like to know whether the FCO has or is planning to put in place a strategy to counter those negative developments and to provide even more support to beleaguered civil societies in a number of countries. Without a thriving and diverse civil society, democracy is very unlikely to take root.

Similarly, I would like to reiterate concerns expressed by Human Rights Watch about Governments who adopt a feigned democracy, championing elections but rejecting basic principles: that laws apply to those in power and that Governments should respect free speech and uphold the rights of unpopular minorities in their countries.

Secondly, I must take issue with what the FCO report says about promoting “our” values, because what we are doing is promoting universal values. In this connection, I must stress how unhelpful the negative domestic discourse about human rights and universal values is. The UK does not exist in a bubble; what we do and say on human rights is seen not only by those in the UK, but by the rest of the world.

How can we take Russia to task, for example, for not respecting international human rights when we seem only too willing to disparage “universal values” and the rules-based international system when they do not suit us? The “Do as we say, not as we do” approach is unlikely to be very persuasive with others and is very likely to harm us all in the longer term. Without greater respect for human rights worldwide, we are likely to have to deal with more instability, more humanitarian crises, more radicalism and a less secure environment for UK business.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I will take five minutes, Mr Chope, to allow my colleagues to speak; I think that fits the arithmetic.

I will put on record the fact that I have raised with the Leader of the House the issue about the conduct of this debate, its timing and the opportunity for it, and I will continue to do so. It is wholly inadequate that we have 90 minutes to discuss the human rights of the whole world, on the back of a serious report by the Foreign Office, the Select Committee’s response to that report and the Government’s response to the Committee’s report. It is incumbent on all of us to put pressure on the relevant channels to ensure that we get a much longer debate on the Floor of the House or a three-hour debate here—something much better than this.

I want to deal with a couple of thematic issues. I attend the United Nations Human Rights Council as often as I can. I find it interesting. It is a great improvement on the Commission on Human Rights, in that there is a more transparent election process for membership of the council, and the universal periodic review process means that every country is put under a microscope at some point. That has to be a good thing. We are now coming to the end of the period for the first reviews in the UPR process. This is beginning to be the problem area. Where a UPR has come up with significant human rights concerns about a particular country—there are many of them—and a report comes back that is inadequate or has responded insufficiently to the Human Rights Council, the question is, how assertive is the Council prepared to be in future? There are no simple answers to this and it is a matter of involving people in debate and negotiation.

I should be interested to hear the Minister’s views on the direction of travel in this regard, because the Human Rights Council provides an opportunity to embarrass the human rights abusers and an opportunity for non-governmental organisations to make their views known, as well. I should be grateful if the Minister confirmed that, in any discussions about the future structure of the Human Rights Council, which Britain is now a member of, the Government will continue to press for one of the basic principles of the United Nations organisation and agencies, which is the opportunity for civil society to be able to speak at the Human Rights Council, and at other agencies. However, I am more concerned about the Human Rights Council, because it provides an expatriate non-governmental organisation, for example, or an NGO in a country with a fairly repressive regime, the one opportunity to embarrass their Government and raise issues of torture and human rights abuse. That is a precious right. I hope that the Government are prepared to support that.

I should also like the Minister to respond, if he could, on the question about Britain’s attitude to the European convention on human rights. I support the convention and guess that every hon. Member in this Chamber does. I support the European Court of Human Rights, in the sense that it exists and is an important process and helps set a benchmark. Many hon. Members have expressed concern, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), my party’s Front-Bench spokesperson, about the treatment of Pussy Riot in Russia and the abuse of human rights there. The European Court of Human Rights process has been quite an important tool for human rights defenders in Russia and in other countries, including Ukraine, Hungary, Turkey and many other places, allowing them to raise such issues. If they think that the British Government’s sole policy is to continually denigrate and attack the European Court of Human Rights, and withdraw from the convention and that human rights process, that has two effects. First, it reduces our moral authority to say anything about anything and, secondly, it is a signal to many other countries that they, too, could follow the same path if life became embarrassing for them. The point of a convention, and of a transnational court, is that it has authority and has an effect on national policies.

There are many countries that I want to mention, but there is not time to do so. I just want to draw attention to the report’s contents concerning Iran, the points about Bahrain made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), and the interesting section on Saudi Arabia, to which attention has been drawn by hon. Members. I ask the Foreign Office and the Committee to persist with Saudi Arabia, particularly on migrant workers, and with regard to the lack of rights for migrant workers all over the Gulf region. The abuse of their human rights and their civil and political rights is a time bomb ticking away.