Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale
Main Page: Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Labour - Life peer)(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale
To move that this House takes note of the numbers of children displaced from their homes internationally, and the actions undertaken by the Government, the European Union and the United Nations to support them.
Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful for this opportunity to raise this vitally important subject, particularly at this time of year. My entry in the register of interests contains a number of interests that might be seen to be relevant, including my position as vice-president of the United Nations children’s fund, UNICEF.
There are close to 30 million displaced children around the world today—in 2018, towards the end of the second decade of the 21st century. Approximately half of those children are refugees or asylum seekers. The other half are internally displaced within their own countries. Those who are refugees, whether accompanied or unaccompanied, and those seeking asylum, whether accompanied or unaccompanied, have some guarantees under international law and some protections from the international agencies, but time and again we see countries turn their backs on those laws and protections and refuse to adequately finance the humanitarian response required when these children spend sometimes many years in camps. Children who are internally displaced do not even have those rights or the possibility of being covered by international law or by the humanitarian response, because the responsibility for them primarily lies with the nation state and the Government of the country in which they live, even if that Government are part of the problem that has led to the children being displaced in the first place.
Millions of these children are unaccompanied—without their parents or guardians, older friends or relatives. Many of them travel thousands of miles before they find a new home. Almost all live in fear of one kind or another. It is sometimes estimated that up to 7 million more, have been displaced by extreme weather events and natural disasters, such as the recent tsunami in Indonesia. These children not only live in fear of violence and abuse, but many of them experienced it before they left and experience it on the way, in some cases time and again. The impact of this displacement and trauma on their personal development, on their education, on their health and perhaps most critically on their mental health is almost incalculable.
Some are survivors of boats that have capsized in the Mediterranean. I met young lads in Sicily 15 months ago who were among the few survivors from a boat that had capsized. Not only had they travelled thousands of miles to get to the boat, not only had they spent time in a detention camp in Libya and seen horrors there, not only had they been through the frightening experience of being on a boat that capsized, but they had struggled to swim and get on to a rescue boat as others drowned alongside them in the sea. The mental trauma that they experienced—not only the boat capsizing or the fear of the boat capsizing but the trauma that they carry with them when they land in Italy, Greece or somewhere else—is stark and has a massive impact on their condition.
There are children in Bangladesh currently living in fear of being returned to Rakhine state in Myanmar. They have already seen horrors that no child should ever see and now face the prospect of being sent back home, with the endorsement of the international community, to fear such violence again. Some children from Syria have now spent five, six or seven years in refugee camps across the border in Iraq, Turkey or Jordan. Yes, there is some form of health service and schooling, but temporary schooling is not schooling—education is more than that. These children have been there for almost all their primary school years, or more than their secondary school years, and many will never recover that missed opportunity.
I could go on and list a number of other examples. More than 50% of the refugees currently in northern Uganda are children, from South Sudan and elsewhere. There are children freezing and starving at the moment in Greece, a European Union country, who have made their way—sometimes unaccompanied, sometimes because their parents died in the water on that trip from Turkey across that small gap, the Mediterranean Sea—to be stuck in Greece because that country cannot deal with the capacity issues of their applications and the European Union does not want to know any more. All this should make us very angry: this is 2018; this is the 21st century. These children are the global scandal of our time and the international response—not just the national response in individual countries—lacks urgency, depth, real commitment and resources. We in the UK are in a position to do more about it and we should.
On 10 and 11 December there will be an inter-governmental conference in Morocco on the global compact for migration. The result of a commitment in 2016, when the New York declaration for refugees and migration was agreed at the United Nations, was to have a UN General Assembly decision on a global compact for migration—safe, orderly migration—and the position of refugees by the end of 2018. This summit must be more than words, more than people turning up and just making the set speeches that they prepared before they left. It must be about those of us in the developed world listening to those in the developing world, where most of these children come from. It must be about those who are not currently involved in conflict really understanding what it is like to live in conflict, what it is like to flee from it and fear having to go back. It must be about reinforcing global rules.
I am strongly in favour of creating safe routes, or safer routes, and protecting children along the way, but they also need to have the global rules that were put in place a long time ago to guarantee their rights whenever they arrive at their destination, chosen or otherwise. There has to be a proper global partnership between what we used to call the rich world and the poor world, between the developed and the developing world, between different continents—because these children travel over continents and between continents as well as across countries. My first question to the Government is: will the UK be represented at this intergovernmental conference at ministerial rather than official level, unlike with some recent events of this sort? Will we agree to endorse and adopt that global compact, should it be agreed at the intergovernmental conference in Morocco on 10 and 11 December?
Ever since a visit to refugee camps and displaced person camps in Iraq a couple of years ago, two children I met have stuck in my mind. One was a story of hope, I suppose: a young lad called Ahmed who, when I asked in a classroom what his ambitions were, first told me that he had come from Mosul and was internally displaced. He had no rights in the international system apart from the provisions that we and others were trying to make available through UNICEF and others. He then told me that not only did he want to do well in school, but he wanted to become an engineer and go back to Mosul. He wanted to go home and rebuild the city he had come from. Later that day I met a young girl called Safa, whom I have mentioned in your Lordships’ House before. She had come from Syria and had been in the camp at that point for three or four years: she is probably still there. She was very confident, 11 years old, able to talk quite coherently about her experience, her family’s experience and the suffering they had seen, but when I asked her how she was doing at school, she burst into tears. The thing that really got to her was that her grades had gone down: that was what really mattered to her in terms of her personal confidence, her as an individual, where she could go in life.
I want to talk briefly about those who are displaced, because we have to keep those who are already displaced in our minds and not forget them. It is too easy, when they are not in the headlines, just to forget that they are there. There was a commitment over recent years to create a global Education Cannot Wait fund. I know that the UK made an initial contribution, as others did, but the targets of that fund have never been met: it is not yet a sustained international commitment. It seems to me that we, as a champion of education internationally, could do more to promote that fund and make sure that it succeeds in providing the kind of education required in these camps, for these children, over so many years. My next question to the Government is: what is our ongoing commitment to education funding for those children in refugee and IDP camps? What are we doing to convince others to make a bigger contribution too?
That education is worthless if the children are not safe. We, like many other European partners, have expertise. Those in northern Europe, western Europe and some parts of central and Mediterranean Europe as well have many decades of experience of child protection systems. They have sometimes let children in this country down, but in the main, if they are implemented properly, they provide a good example to the rest of the world. I would be interested to know today what we are doing to assist those who are trying to protect children when they are in refugee or IDP camps from the sorts of predators that exist in those locations—both inside the camps and those who might traffic them elsewhere.
The second question that I want to raise is: what happens to those on the move? Fifteen months ago, I met Nikki in Sicily. She had run away from Nigeria and would not want me to tell the House today what the circumstances were, but she was desperate to move for all sorts of reasons. She was very afraid of some things and was pregnant when she left Nigeria. When she arrived in the detention camps in Libya, she was six months’ pregnant and spent a couple of months there. When she was eight months’ pregnant she got into a boat without a lifejacket, along with 250 others, to go across the Mediterranean Sea and arrived in Sicily. I do not think any of us can imagine her experiences along the way—at every border or every time the traffickers stopped and she was passed on to somebody else—or what she experienced even as a pregnant woman in the detention camp in Libya, which we are partly financing.
We therefore have an obligation as we have been part of, and will probably continue in some way to be part of, the European response to that crisis of migration across the Mediterranean. We have an obligation to do more to ensure that the routes which people follow are safe. We need to do much more to ensure that the conditions are safe for people to live inside those Libyan camps where there are Libyan security forces, if we can call them that, and to which the Libyan coastguard is returning people—and that they are properly assessed and assisted rather than just abused and rejected. I would be interested to know more about what the Government are doing to learn the lessons of recent years and to improve that relationship with Libya, which has been central to the European strategy.
The third thing I want to raise is the position of those who might move in the future. I do not want to repeat all the arguments made in a previous debate in your Lordships’ House today. However, if we are to ensure that there are fewer children fleeing violence, war and conflict or fleeing starvation, poverty and ill health in the future, then the sustainable development goals surely are that driving force which will allow us, and others, to contribute to greater prosperity at home. That will mean that fewer children have to be on the move in the future, for whatever reason. In relation to this, goal 16 on peace, justice, strong institutions and human rights has to be central. I welcome very much the Government’s recent doubling of the UK’s contribution to the UN peacebuilding fund but we have to ensure that these children are protected at home—that they have the rights so that they are not forced to run. We could also do just a little more with our technical expertise to help build resilience in those places where extreme weather events result in millions being displaced.
Finally, if we are to adopt new immigration laws in this country as we leave the European Union over the coming months, surely we can do something about our family reunion laws. Surely we can find a way so that more children—they have to scrape their way across the Sahara and somehow find their way across the Mediterranean, then when they get to Europe must battle to get to Calais and find their way over here—can legally come to this country and be reunited with their families without having to go through all that trauma and horror.
In the 1960s, the images of children in Vietnam being bombed by the Americans caused international outrage. In the 1970s, the images of children in Soweto being massacred by apartheid South Africa caused international outrage. In the 1980s, there were colour pictures—perhaps showing this for the first time so vividly—of children starving to death in front of our eyes in Ethiopia during the famine, and they caused international outrage and action. Surely in this decade and this century the position of these children, which is the global scandal of our times, can cause that international outrage and then we can do more, faster and more effectively, to help them.
Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale
My Lords, this is the third year in a row when I have submitted a balloted debate on this topic just before Christmas, and I am delighted that I was successful in being able to lead this debate today, for the first time in those three years.
I am very grateful to the Members of Your Lordships’ House who have contributed this afternoon; there may have been few of us, but we made up for what we lacked in quantity in the quality, passion and detail of the debate. I am also very grateful to the Minster here this afternoon, the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, for her attempt to answer as many questions as possible and for treating the subject very seriously in her response.
As I said earlier, I think this is the single biggest scandal in the world today. It is something that will shame generations to come if we do not deal with it. I think we have demonstrated today that, in the UK, we can make a difference. I am grateful for that opportunity.