Civil Society Space

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered protecting civil society space across the world.

This issue is of some interest to me, as it is to all the right hon. and hon. Members who have turned up to participate in and add their thoughts to the debate. I will focus on three countries: Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Other Members will focus on other countries of interest to them.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate to me and my co-sponsors, the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) and, on the Front Bench for the Scottish National party, the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady). It is good for the three of us collectively to have the opportunity to bring this subject before the House.

This debate came off the back of a meeting that I had here with Christian Aid and other bodies from Pakistan in September 2016, during a recess week. They presented a clear case about Pakistan and its religious minorities to me and some of my colleagues from the all-party parliamentary group on Pakistan minorities. I will introduce and discuss the three main issues.

Throughout the world, civil society space has been under significant pressure as restrictions on funding, barriers to registration, intervention in non-governmental organisations’ internal affairs and other forms of harassment have proliferated. The phenomenon of closing such spaces has a propensity to disrupt and paralyse the important work of such organisations, which is crucial to build and reinforce a peaceful and stable society. As I outline my case, I hope that hon. Members and the audience here, on television and elsewhere will grasp what we mean by protecting civil society space across the world.

Longer term, the closure of civil society threatens to weaken irreversibly the infrastructure of human rights movements, which, in turn, could endanger hard-won progress on human rights globally. That is an issue of great importance to me.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)]

We are witnessing a serious escalation of restrictions on civic space by the Bahraini authorities, with travel restrictions, biased judicial proceedings, the vilification of civil society members and—in recent days, following allegations of torture—worrying executions that some organisations believe amount to extrajudicial killings. Considering the millions being spent by the Foreign Office on technical assistance to Bahrain, does the hon. Gentleman agree that the UK should be more outspoken on such matters?

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. She is vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary human rights group, so I know the good work that she does. She has been a focal person in speaking out on such issues, and I wholeheartedly endorse that. She has outlined a number of the things that she, I and others have written about to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The nature of restrictions on civil society varies, but common elements of such laws include: targeting activists who scrutinise Government policies; increased scrutiny of NGO activities and sources of funding, which is all very investigative and focused on making life difficult for the NGOs; and, in some cases, the targeting of organisations that work on issues such as women’s rights, freedom of religion or belief, LGBTI or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex rights, migrants’ rights, and the environment. Those are all critical and important issues in civil society throughout the world. It is important to retain such organisations.

Repressive practices are not limited to states such as Russia, Egypt or Pakistan: they are in danger of spreading across the world, as the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) said in her intervention. Civil society experts have spoken of a contagion effect, whereby repressive laws introduced in one country are copied by its neighbours, who might think, “That’s the way to do it.” It is not.