Refugees: Eritrea

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

As my noble friend Lady Anelay has made clear, we took very seriously the UN special rapporteur’s report on the situation in Eritrea. In fact, it was the basis of the ongoing Article 8 dialogue with the EU as part of the Khartoum process. It seems that the Eritrean Government have given an undertaking to limit national service, which was the principal driver of a lot of the migration flows. On the noble Baroness’s second point, we have had an opportunity to look at the Select Committee’s report, which was published on 5 January and is very thorough. We will be responding to it in due course but it raises a number of very important issues.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that the June 2015 report of the UN commission of inquiry said that probable crimes against humanity are being committed in Eritrea? That is why there has been such a haemorrhaging of the population, with 10% of the people—some 350,000—having fled thus far. If we do not come to terms with the root causes, will not those massive numbers of migrants continue to rise? What are we doing to pursue the recommendations in that report? Furthermore, does the Minister not recognise that when those migrants leave Eritrea, the story is not over, as the beheadings in Libya by ISIS only go to prove?

[Lord Bates]

That is absolutely right. It was a horrific report and it is not something on which the British Government are standing idly by. It is an issue on which we have engaged with the Eritrean Government through our embassy in Asmara. There was a meeting between the Foreign Minister and James Brokenshire at the margins of the EU and African Union conference in Rome in November, and that was followed up by a visit by Foreign Office and Home Office officials to assess the situation there. We continue to put great pressure on the Eritrean Government to live up to the commitments that they have made. It is only by tackling the cause of the problem, whether in Eritrea or Syria, that we can hope to stem the flow that results in the consequences that the noble Lord has highlighted.