UK Opt-in to the Proposed Council Decision on the Relocation of Migrants within the EU (EUC Report)

Lord Ribeiro Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ribeiro (Con)]

My Lords, like other Peers, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, for securing the debate. The UK has a unique role in Europe in that, like France, it has a significant colonial past with positive and negative connotations. The positive legacy is that the UK still has many friends in Africa, in particular sub-Saharan Africa, from where many migrants emanate. I shall focus on Africa as the continent I know best, because, as a migrant of some 63 years in this country, I probably know more about it than most. Of the three countries that have been referred to as being eligible for admission under the scheme, Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa, is the only African country.

However, many from west Africa are undoubtedly economic migrants. Many of them started to go to countries such as Libya, Tunisia and Egypt to better themselves, improve their family and send money back home. They have come not only from francophone countries but from anglophone countries in west Africa.

The problems that have occurred in Libya with the change in government—in fact, no government in some respects—the warfare, the abuse and the persecution, have meant that those who went there as economic migrants now choose to leave as persecuted people, in the same way as many in Syria and Iraq. We must make the point that there are those who are genuinely fleeing oppression, and that needs to be taken into account in dealing with them.

Our focus, naturally, has been on people around the Mediterranean rim. We have heard in an evidence session even today, from Franck Düvell, a senior researcher from the University of Oxford, that 90% of those who embark on journeys to Europe succeed, with 1% dying on the way. So for a migrant, a 99% success rate is a risk worth taking. To them, the prize at the end is what matters.

If we reflect on the fact that in this House we often say that hard cases make bad law, we must also be careful that we do not let the tragic incidents which have occurred—and they are indeed tragic—divert us from the fact that we need to get to the solution via the causes of the problem. As the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said, we need to deal with the causes not just the symptoms. The Spanish Interior Minister, Senor Diaz, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday as saying:

“It’s like when you have a leaky roof: Instead of fixing it, we distribute water between the rooms”.

Surely, as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, identified, we would do better to work with the sub-Saharan African states to fix the leaky roof.

The UK is one of five EU member states in the Khartoum process and should use its influence to bring greater pressure to bear on the African Union, which also has responsibility in this matter. We talk about the pull factor but there is also a push factor and in order to get a push factor you have to have countries that do not have secure borders or arrangements to ensure that their people are not persecuted or made uncomfortable about staying in those countries. The African Union has responsibilities in relation to migration, both regular and irregular. Sudan enacted a law against human trafficking in March 2014, yet conflict in South Sudan is a major factor in migration, some of which passes through Sudan to Europe.

At the meeting of the African Union in Khartoum in October 2014, the African Union Commission Director for Social Affairs acknowledged that despite action plans in 2006 and 2009, human trafficking and the smuggling of migrants remains a “caustic challenge”, particularly in the Horn of Africa. He said:

“Many Member States in the Sub-region are yet to ratify the Trafficking in Persons Protocol and/or fully implement it with national legislation in their respective domain”.

The UN has been mentioned today and certainly the UNCHR has offered to help but I believe that this is a challenge for the UN itself to deal with. There are issues and problems with the UN. We know that in the Security Council there is disagreement between the various parties about this issue and therefore very little has happened. But dealing with many of the conflicts in the zones and areas that we have talked about is the way to address the problem.

We have talked about the Horn of Africa. There is also Niger, which is a major transit point for many migrants. The reason is the problems we have seen recently with Boko Haram in Nigeria and many people being displaced from that country to surrounding areas. My questions to the Minister are: what input have the UK Government had in the discussions with the EU members of the Khartoum process? What is our response to the action plan for 2014-17 set by the EU-Africa Summit in 2014, which focuses on the following priorities: trafficking in human beings; the diaspora, which is one of the pull factors; mobility and labour migration, including intra-African mobility, which I referred to earlier; international protection, which we feel is a right for all those who migrate; and irregular migration, which is the basis of our discussion today? We have heard much about the pull and push factors driving migration but I would like to know what we can do in the long term to contain the problem, which can be solved only through conflict resolution.