Operation Sophia: A Failed Mission (EUC Report)

Lord Horam Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the House for the fact that I may not be able to stay until the end of the debate because of a previous and inescapable commitment, about which I have told my noble friend on the Front Bench. I thank my noble friend Lady Verma and the staff of the committee for their usual extremely effective and thoughtful work.

I agree with the remark made by the noble Lord, Lord Jay, that, in effect, Operation Sophia could not succeed. We entitled our first report An Impossible Challenge; if you have an impossible challenge, by definition you cannot succeed in it. The noble Lord may be interested to know that Sir Alan Duncan said in the government response, which I am sure he has read:

“Operation SOPHIA has not delivered all that we had hoped”—


which is a rather more diplomatic way of putting the point we tried to make in our report.

However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, who is on the committee with me, pointed out, it has not been a humanitarian failure. Indeed, 39,000 migrants were saved, 12,000 of them in UK assets—so we can be proud of that side of the story. Where the operation failed was in the fact that it did not reduce the migrant flows, and clearly it did not disrupt the traffickers’ operation, which was the ultimate objective of the proposals. It did not succeed because it came too late in the pipeline; that was the difficulty. When people are literally within swimming length of safety, you are hardly going to stop them at that point.

This has been realised, particularly by the Italian Government, which has to bear the burden of all this, and improvements have been made to the overall approach since we reported. First of all, the training and support for the Libyan coastguard service has been substantially improved, both in terms of the skill set required and the financial asset—simply the salaries and wages. Paying people properly helps them to do their job rather than not doing it properly. One is led to believe that the Italian Government have dealt directly—this is a rather tricky area—with some of the traffickers to change the incentives they look for in their business model, and that has had some effect. Therefore, there has been some reduction from last year in what is happening this summer, which is good news.

The result of that is that more people have been detained in detention centres, which is a problem. There are 48 centres at the moment, 34 of them controlled by the Libyan Government, and the UK Government fund 22 of them. They are helped by the UNHCR and the European Union. Effort is therefore going into establishing once again opportunities for employment and so forth in those camps. I can say quite frankly, as the House will understand, that the quality of life in those camps varies considerably, from the appalling to the not too bad, and that is a matter of concern.

The next step is to deal with the issue on the southern borders of Libya. We said in the report, rather interestingly:

“Both King Idris (who ruled Libya until 1969)”—


this is going back a long way—

“and Colonel Gaddafi had ‘recognised and used the existing tribal system along the land borders’. They had used border guards, intelligence and security officials and ‘border social-security’, in the form of ‘donatives and flows of money and investment from the centre to the regions to keep the border populations on side’”.

That is what happened to keep the borders quiet during that period—and clearly it was, to a degree, successful.

Keeping the border tight is now being tackled by the European Union under the auspices of its emergency trust fund for Africa. The EU has set aside €46 million for an operation to improve matters there, and the Italian Government, in collaboration with the European authorities, have sent out an assessment mission to look at that. But the problem is that security issues in Libya are preventing it being effective and the operation has been delayed at the moment because of those problems. Therefore, there is a real issue there.

Beyond that, as my noble friend Lady Chalker pointed out succinctly from her own experience, we should tackle this issue by trying to prevent migrant flows at source. I have no doubt that a great deal of good work has been done in this area in many countries—Nigeria has already been mentioned, as have others—but, frankly, some countries are almost impossible to deal with. Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea, for example, are under the heel of appalling dictatorships, and how you get some sort of sensible relationship, backed by international aid from the UK, I do not know. That is very much work in progress.

Therefore, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Jay, that none of this is at all easy. We are looking forward to seeing what measures are put in place at the June Council of the European Union—but so far the preliminary discussions have not gone particularly well. Chancellor Merkel of Germany described this issue at the Council as an existential question. In more senses than one, it is.