UK and Kazakhstan

Peter Grant Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mr Davies. Bliadhna Mhath Ùr dhuibh uile an seo. Happy new year to all those present. I commend the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) for securing the debate, and I apologise for the slight confusion about the speaking order. I do not think that either my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) or I have got over the shock of discovering at 8 o’clock last night that we would be on now, rather than at half-past 4, but we got here on time.

It is interesting that most of the speakers agree on what we are looking for. Kazakhstan is clearly a country of enormous strategic importance, but it is not our country; it is theirs, and we have to be careful about interfering too far in someone else’s country. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) pointed out, it is a country that has not yet managed to shake off the chains of the dictatorship its people lived under in Soviet times. It is a country with massive mineral wealth, and that inevitably means that everyone wants to be its friend. The judgment call that the UK Government and other Governments have to make must be this: where do we balance out the desire to ensure development in a way that matches our interests with not ignoring the serious human rights issues that continue to emerge?

Other speakers have commented on some of the more serious cases, so I will not repeat the details, but it often seems that if a country’s press is not genuinely free, its human rights record will never be all that good. If no one is allowed to criticise, even if the criticism turns out to be unjustified, human rights abuses, corruption and the abuse of power will carry on, and even those who feel they should draw attention to and expose such criminal acts are scared to because they are worried about what the consequences might be for them.

It is noticeable that Kazakhstan as a whole is already starting to reap the economic benefits of the massive natural resources at its disposal. Economic growth is significantly higher than in many other countries. Its GDP per capita places it well above average and pushes it just about into the top quartile of the world’s countries—according to my good friends at the CIA, who I find are good sources of information on any country I want to check up on. By comparison, however, the lot of the typical Kazakhstan citizen is not all that great. It is 152nd in the world for life expectancy—almost into the third quartile—and 157th and 138th for health and education expenditure respectively. Those are figures we would expect to see from a country that did not have the resources to invest in its people. Compared with many parts of the UK, Kazakhstan has a relatively young population, with the majority of its citizens of working age—between 25 and 55—and a significant number of young people as well, so by investing in education and health it can start to improve life expectancy.

It may be that life expectancy has been reduced by the appalling environmental legacy of the former Soviet masters. There is no doubt that taking advantage of the oil and mineral wealth has left behind pollution on a catastrophic scale. Kazakhstan borders the Aral sea, which has been described by some as the world’s worst ever man-made environmental disaster. Because of a number of misguided policies of previous Soviet Governments, the sea is down to a fraction of its previous volume, which means that the pollution that flowed into it has now been left to blow around, affecting the health and lives of both the people and the livestock on which the agricultural economy of parts of the country greatly relies.

Some 59,000 children under the age of 14 are in employment in Kazakhstan. Why is that happening in what is a wealthy country?

Hon. Members have commented on the fact that there is, at first glance, a democratic society in Kazakhstan. People are allowed to vote in elections, but I do not think one needs to be too cynical to wonder whether elections are genuinely free and fair if between 95% and 97% of people vote for the same party. It is possible to get 95% of elected politicians from the same party without that—as my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire and I can testify—but that is because of a flaw in an electoral system that is far from perfect. However, any election in which such a high proportion of the electorate is said to have voted in the same way makes one wonder whether they had a proper choice. The result is possibly partly explained by the enormous personal popularity of the President. If he is seen by his people as someone who has done a lot to manage the transition from what was effectively a colony of Russia to an independent nation and they are enormously grateful to him for that, we must respect that and their decision to vote for him.

Just a few weeks ago, Kazakhstan became the first and so far only country in central Asia to sign an enhanced partnership and co-operation agreement with the European Union. Interestingly, in the early stages of negotiation, the EU made it clear that progress towards such an agreement would depend on progress in Kazakhstan’s human rights record. If anything, that record has deteriorated over the time of the negotiations. The European Scrutiny Committee, on which you and I serve, Mr Davies, might want to return to that when the agreements on closer co-operation between the EU and Kazakhstan start coming through for UK Government Ministers to ratify or not—that is, if the EU is still relevant to the UK Government in a few years’ time. Will the Minister indicate what view the Government take on the agreement? Do they feel that Kazakhstan has made sufficient progress on human rights for us to sign up to that agreement, or should we be looking for more?

We have to recognise that progress has been made, but we also have to recognise that that progress has been far too slow. If anything, we have been regressing rather than progressing. I hope that we will get an assurance that, as well as looking for trade deals that would benefit our economy and provide export opportunities for the United Kingdom, we will set an example of what used to be termed an ethical foreign policy. I hope the Minister will assure us that we will not allow UK investment power or the desire for economic growth in the United Kingdom to come at the cost of the abuse of human rights and the exploitation of child workers in some major industries in Kazakhstan, or at the cost of our turning a blind ear or a deaf ear to the cries of religious minorities who are not allowed to practise their faith in peace, or of journalists and other media workers who are not allowed to express fair criticism and are effectively not allowed to disagree publicly with the party line. I am interested to hear what he has to say about that. I am also very interested to see what comes before the European Scrutiny Committee in the presumably not too distant future. It would be good to look into the area in more detail.

I understand the strategic concerns of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about Russia and China wooing Kazakhstan hard. If we have a country that would not match our definition of a full democracy, but which has a substantial Muslim population and a leader who is absolutely determined not to allow his country to become a breeding ground for Daesh and its preaching of hatred and death, there are clear reasons why we should want to speak to that country and be friends with it. We may at times have to be critical friends, and sometimes that criticism may need to be severe indeed.