BBC World Service and British Council

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

To move that this House takes note of the role of the BBC World Service and the British Council in promoting British values and interests worldwide.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking my noble friends on the Cross Benches for selecting this Motion for debate today. It draws attention to the role of the BBC World Service and the British Council in promoting British values, part of what Joseph Nye once described as the exercise of soft power. It sits comfortably with the debate that will follow in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf, which draws attention to the role our legal institutions play in promoting Britain’s reputation and way of life worldwide. I am grateful to all noble Lords who will participate, many of whom bring a lifetime of experience and knowledge. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, the Minister who will reply. The House of Lords Library also deserves our thanks for the excellent note it has prepared for today’s debate.

It hardly needs saying that all of our speeches will be held against a backdrop in the Middle East of the exercise of a different kind of power, characterised by visceral hatred and unspeakable violence. They are being held in a climate in which fragile peace and seedling democracies, from the China Sea to Ukraine, are at daily risk. That is to say nothing of global violation of human rights, from North Korea to Sudan, from Nigeria to Pakistan.

More than 30 years ago as a young Member of the House of Commons travelling behind the iron curtain, and in 1981 to India, Nepal and China, I first began to fully understand the importance of the BBC World Service and the British Council as agents for change. The BBC World Service started life in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service, with Sir John Reith—later Lord Reith—warning,

“don’t expect too much in the early days … The programmes will neither be very interesting nor very good”.

More than 80 years later, with a global audience last month of 265 million people and transmitting in English and 27 other languages, there is no doubt that the World Service has surpassed all of Lord Reith’s modest expectations. Often, it has been the only lifeline to honest reporting of news and current affairs. Mikhail Gorbachev said that he listened to the BBC’s transmissions. However, both organisations—the British Council and the World Service—promote the UK’s economic interests too. In one survey of international business leaders in America, India and Australia, two-thirds said that the BBC was the main way in which they found out about the United Kingdom. Hence, the Motion talks about promoting our values and our interests.

During the past 10 years, as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea and during visits to remote parts of Africa and Burma, my appreciation of the BBC World Service and the British Council has grown into deep admiration, not least for courageous BBC journalists, such as its chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and the head of the BBC’s Burma service Tin Htar Swe, who were both recently honoured in the Birthday Honours List.

Courage, however, comes at a price. Let us consider the 90 journalists killed since the start of the Syrian conflict three years ago, with scores of others kidnapped, or the imprisonment of journalists in Egypt, including Peter Greste, the former BBC journalist. James Harding, the BBC’s director of news, said that these jailings were an,

“act of intimidation against all journalists”.

Getting the news out and getting the news in are therefore two sides of one coin.

In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi says that World Service transmissions reach more than 80% of people. When I visited her in March last year, she told me that the World Service had been a game-changer. Of course, she also listened to the World Service during her many years of detention, describing it as a lifeline. Believing passionately in the power of ideas, she used her Nobel Peace Prize money to establish her own Democratic Voice of Burma radio service.

At the World Service’s 80th anniversary commemoration held in December 2012 at St Martin-in-the-Fields, I was particularly struck by the words of a young Ukrainian woman, who described how her parents had illegally concealed a radio beneath their floorboards and would bring it out clandestinely to listen to the news from London. She said that the proudest day of her parents’ lives was when she told them that she had secured a job at Bush House, where the BBC World Service was located from 1940 until 2012. Not without significance, the audience of the Ukrainian service has tripled in the past 12 months. A long-serving BBC foreign correspondent, Allan Little, recalls an elderly Jewish man in Paris who agreed to give him an interview because, as a boy in hiding in wartime Poland, the BBC was the only way he knew to keep on hoping. He also recalls the old independence fighter in Zimbabwe who hated the British yet, when he wanted to know what was happening in the world, listened in secret. He said, “We listened to you and we trusted you”.

Like many, Little regards the trust placed in the World Service and the BBC, fiercely guarded across the world and over generations, as a kind of covenant. Credibility and authority—what Peter Horrocks, the World Service director, calls “radical impartiality”—marks out the BBC from its competition in increasingly crowded airwaves and with the phenomenal growth of the internet. However, at a meeting held here just two nights ago, Mr Horrocks also pointed out that a broadcaster such as Al-Jazeera probably has a budget two to three times bigger than that of BBC News. If the BBC World Service is not to decline, I hope that the Minister will tell us that comparative resources will form part of the review of the BBC charter scheduled for next year. I hope that the Minister will also say something about the current ambiguity in the BBC World Service’s lines of accountability and its mandate.

On 1 April this year, a great and almost unremarked on change occurred when the Foreign Office ceased to fund the World Service. From now on, the £245 million bill will be borne by the licence fee payer. In January the House of Commons Select Committee which looked at this question voiced strong opposition to the plans outlined by the BBC Trust for wider commercialisation at the World Service. Its March 2014 report, The Future of the BBC World Service, outlined concerns about the impact of changes in the funding of the World Service.

Although the committee welcomed budget increases, it urged the BBC to announce detailed future funding allocations to allow the World Service to plan for the longer term. Many of us share the Select Committee’s apprehension that further commercialisation will both overinfluence the BBC’s decisions on where and what to broadcast, and diminish our ability to use the service to pursue foreign policy objectives. The example of the BBC World News offers salutary lessons. Conceived as the sister television arm of the World Service, this continuous news channel has 74 million viewers each week in 200 countries, and powerfully projects British values worldwide. Unlike radio, BBC World News is owned and operated by a commercial entity, BBC Global News Ltd, and relies entirely on subscription, advertising and sponsorship deals to survive.

The failure of the current business plan means that on the 17th of this month BBC World News is to announce what its managers are calling “significant savings”—that is, cuts. These will come on top of year 3 cuts to BBC News under the programme Delivering Quality First, which since 2010 has seen spending on news cut by 20% and the loss of 2,000 jobs in the BBC. The danger of the commercial imperative alone is that the BBC becomes dependent on it and, instead of seeing such deals as useful, it sees them as additional resource. It cannot be in the British interest for the BBC’s presence in the global media landscape to be increasingly subject to the vagaries of the ups and downs of the advertising market. It is bad for Britain’s business needs, and it is bad for the business of what Britain is all about. I hope that the Minister will do her best to allay those fears today.

In considering commercial factors versus our Article 19 obligation under the 1948 declaration on human rights to take no notice of frontiers but to communicate information worldwide, the Minister may want to comment on the example of North Korea, which was recently listed by the United Nations as a “country without parallel” and a perpetrator of human rights abuses. In the view of the author of the report, Mr Justice Michael Kirby, BBC World Service broadcasts to the Korean peninsula would be a welcome contribution to breaking the information blockade that imprisons North Korea. Professor Andrei Lankov states in his book The Real North Korea:

“The only long-term solution … is to increase North Korea’s awareness of the outside world”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, will say more on this subject when she makes her speech, and we will return to it in a Question for Short Debate in a few days.

Staying with North Korea for a moment, I particularly welcome the British Council’s English language work there, which I have seen first hand. I also welcome the work of the British Council in Burma. During my 2013 visit, I gave a lecture at the British Council library in Rangoon. I am told that the British Council receives more than 200,000 Burmese visitors to its sites in Rangoon and Mandalay each year. The libraries in Burma have more than 10,000 members and there is a network of 19 remote learning centres across the country. The British Council’s Facebook page has 340,000 “likes”—almost a quarter of the total internet users in the country.

The British Council was established in 1934 and incorporated by royal charter in 1940. It has 70 British Council teaching centres in 53 countries. It taught more than 1 million class hours to 300,000 learners in one recent year, and it describes itself as,

“the world’s largest English-language teaching organisation”.

I know that other noble Lords will speak more about its work, but let me give the example of Project English, which has benefited more than 27 million learners in India already. There is the Young Arab Voices initiative that has helped more than 25,000 young Egyptians, Tunisians and Jordanians. But in 2010-11 the FCO grant was 27% of the British Council’s income. In 2013-14 that grant is forecast to be less than 20% of total income and the proportion is projected to decrease, reaching 16% of total income by 2015-16.

Last month, the Prime Minister said that British values are,

“a belief in freedom, tolerance of others, accepting personal and social responsibility, respecting and upholding the rule of law”.

But he went on to say that these values do not come from thin air, and resources do not come from thin air either. We must be prepared to see the value of these amazing instruments of soft power and ensure that they are adequately resourced. Our military response to global threats and new forms of terror will always require hard power, of course, but we are disproportionate in spending hundreds of times more on hard power than on soft power. Combining the two, what Hillary Clinton has described as “smart power”, should be part of our approach. That is a view which was put by the House of Lords Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence in its March 2014 report entitled Persuasion and Power in the Modern World. It said:

“The ‘reach’ of the BBC and the British Council is immense, and this certainly adds to their ability to enhance the UK’s soft power”.

Before I conclude, I highlight for noble Lords a particular work by a notable champion of soft power, the former US ambassador to Hungary, Mark Palmer, who died a year ago. I commend his book Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025. We have just 10 years left to meet the deadline he set, and I believe that the BBC World Service and the British Council have a crucial role to play in achieving that. I pay tribute to Mark Palmer, and I believe that we in this country could learn much from his ideas. We can also learn from those put forward by the British Academy, which has said in a report:

“UK foreign policy is too often conducted in a compartmentalised manner, with the would-be benefits of soft power either judged to be outweighed by security concerns, or simply never taken into account”.

Soft power is, as the report concludes,

“likely to become more important in international relations over the coming years. UK governments can help themselves simply by recognising this, and by providing enough resources for the development and maintenance of its long-term assets”.

In moving this Motion, I ask the Minister what steps Her Majesty’s Government are taking to strengthen the deployment of soft power, how we are going to combine soft power with hard power, and to affirm, as I hope she will, our continuing belief on all sides of the House that the BBC World Service and the British Council are indispensable in promoting British values and interests throughout the world.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, for the way in which she has responded to what has been an amazingly rich and incredibly well informed debate. All the speeches in your Lordships’ House today have come from either personal or professional experience. The number of people who said that they had heard the World Service in remote parts of the world was striking. We travelled from the remote parts of the Borneo borders to the Arctic Circle, and we were also in Tehran, Beijing, Afghanistan, North Korea, Egypt, Russia, Juba and even at one point Glasgow. We have travelled widely.

We also heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, and the noble Lord, Lord Bach, along with my noble friend Lady Prashar, their first-hand experiences of either being trustees or working today in the British Council or, in the case of my noble friend Lord Williams, of being a trustee of the BBC World Service. They gave professional and intimate accounts. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, described himself as a child of the British Council, his father having worked for it. I can only say that if that is his parentage then the British Council has a great deal to be proud of, as we do in this House, because he is a pretty good advertisement for it.

We also heard about the importance of the foreign languages that can be promoted via the British Council and the BBC World Service, and our Commonwealth links. Regarding soft power versus propaganda, the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, made an important point about moral authority. We talked about accountability and the question of values. I think it was Gertrude Himmelfarb who said that sometimes “values” is rather a weak word in comparison with “virtues”. However, I think that perhaps we are also rather modest in this country and do not like to talk about any of our institutions. The British Council and World Service were described by my noble friend Lord Williams as “two renowned and much loved” institutions. We do not often like to talk of them in quite that way, but we have nothing to be ashamed of. These are two wonderful institutions that reach vast numbers of people all over the world.

It was the Prime Minister, describing values, who said that British values are,

“a belief in freedom, tolerance of others”—

“tolerance” was a word that my noble friend Lord Jay returned to—

“accepting personal and social responsibility, respecting and upholding the rule of law”.

That is a pretty good starting point. We may have others that we want to add to the list, and we may have concerns, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, described, but at least today’s debate has given us a framework.

As we proceed to the triennial review of the British Council and think about the future funding of the BBC World Service, the Government will be in no doubt as a result of today’s debate that your Lordships in all parts of this House—even though the debate was initiated from the Cross-Benches, there have been valuable contributions from all parts of the Chamber— will be watching not just with apprehension and concern but in the great hope that the Government will continue to support both the World Service and the British Council. With those remarks, I conclude the debate.

Motion agreed.

South Sudan

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

The Oslo conference, at which my honourable friend Lynne Featherstone worked very hard to secure contributions, did indeed produce firm commitments from international donors. We entirely agree that the pledges should be honoured and we welcome any steps taken in that regard. As regards the one my noble friend has just suggested in relation to the DEC, we would certainly welcome it taking such a move. On his second point, he is right: we constantly seek to expand the number of contributor countries.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, given that the whole of South Sudan is mired in violence and, indeed, corruption, what confidence does the noble Baroness have that the aid will reach the people it is meant to reach and will not be subverted for other purposes? Will she also comment on the reports published yesterday that the situation in the north is also deteriorating, with 5 million people there now suspected of being at risk of famine?

[Baroness Northover]

The noble Lord is quite right to point to these challenges. He will probably also know that the EU should be bringing forward a sanctions regime shortly, which we support. The United Nations is also looking at that because it is extremely important that problems such as looting are dealt with and that anyone who is getting in the way of the delivery of humanitarian aid is properly challenged and tackled.

Sudan: Meriam Ibrahim

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what actions they have taken to secure the release of Meriam Ibrahim, sentenced to death for apostasy in Sudan, and to promote the terms of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and other senior Ministers have condemned the sentence against Meriam Ibrahim in the strongest terms. We have raised our concerns with Sudanese Ministers and formally summoned the Sudanese chargé d’affaires in London. We urge Sudan to uphold its international obligations on freedom of religion by reversing this decision.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. In a week in which we are focused on violence against women, is not the cruel treatment of Meriam Ibrahim—sentenced to 100 lashes to be followed by execution, and shackled while giving birth—emblematic of a regime which, from Darfur to South Kordofan, systematically murders and mistreats its own people? While I greatly welcome the Prime Minister’s condemnation of those medieval and tainted laws, is it not time that we exposed the hypocrisy of countries such as Sudan that sign up to the 1948 declaration of human rights, especially to Article 18, yet honour it only in its breach and treat their citizens in this barbaric way? Should we not be offering Meriam Ibrahim and her two little ones immediate refugee status, unequivocally demonstrating the value of a civilised country and a humane society?

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.

Sudan

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the humanitarian situation in Darfur and other parts of the Republic of Sudan following the decision of the Government of Sudan to suspend the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

Around 3.5 million people in Darfur are in need of humanitarian assistance, including around 380,000 people who were displaced in 2013. The suspension of the ICRC’s work therefore comes at a critical time, as it supports more than a million people. We are seriously concerned about the impact of this decision on them.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that reply. Will she confirm that in the 10 years that have elapsed since I described to your Lordships’ House the conditions in the refugee camps in Darfur, some 2 million people have been displaced and between 200,000 and 300,000 people have died there? Some 57 peacekeepers and UNAMID personnel have been murdered, with no consequences for those responsible, while humanitarian agencies are expelled and aerial bombardment continues unabated, both in Darfur and in Kordofan. Why, while these serial violations occur, do we use British resources to pay off Sudan’s debts? Why, as we approach the fifth anniversary of the indictment for crimes against humanity of Field Marshal Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, can he travel abroad with impunity and continue to control vast personal and commercial interests while openly boasting that 2014 will be the year that he will finish off what he began in Darfur 10 years ago?

Human Rights

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

That this House takes note of Her Majesty’s Government’s policy towards countries responsible for violations of human rights.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, in just under three weeks’ time, we will mark the 65th anniversary of the adoption of a declaration which asserted that,

“disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want”.

It is as much a declaration of human dignity as a declaration of human rights. I hope that those words and the declaration’s 30 articles will serve as the architecture for today’s debate. These rights are universal and not available for selective enforcement according to culture, tradition or convenience.

Every year, the Foreign Office publishes a comprehensive report on human rights violations. It clearly should be followed by an annual debate in both Houses, the appetite for which is underlined by the distinguished list of speakers who will contribute today, albeit in speeches far too constrained by time limits. We eagerly await four maiden speeches: those of the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of Cradley, the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, and the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, whose grandfather, Dr Alfred Wiener, dedicated much of his life to documenting anti-Semitism and racism in Germany, and whose first wife, Margarethe, died shortly after being released from Bergen-Belsen.

It was in the aftermath of those horrific events that the 1948 declaration was promulgated, the United Nations established, and the Nuremberg trials commenced. During today’s debate, I hope that we will reflect on whether the Security Council, the General Assembly, the United Nations Human Rights Council, which replaced the discredited Commission on Human Rights in 2006, and the International Criminal Court, established by the Rome statute in 2002, have been effective guarantors of the high ideals of that declaration.

It is just 10 days since China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam were all elected to the Human Rights Council despite concerns about their own human rights records and their decision to exclude United Nations monitors from their jurisdictions. Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, has said:

“All victims of human rights abuses should be able to look to the Human Rights Council as a forum and a springboard for action”.

But will they be able to do so with any certainty in the future? I shall be interested to hear whether the noble Baroness believes that international bodies charged with upholding human rights should be wholly independent of national governments who violate them.

China, in particular, has huge diplomatic, political, economic and military influence, and its attitude will determine the shape of global attitudes to human rights. Through the Opium Wars to the Rape of Nanking and the horrors of Mao Tse-Tung, China has itself suffered gross human rights violations. The protection and promotion of human rights should not only be seen as a moral cause, but it can never be in a nation’s self-interest to see universal freedoms and values trampled upon.

In today’s debate, we will hear about the situation in many countries and we will hear many themes, from female genital mutilation and the use of rape as a weapon of war to the killing of human rights monitors—in Colombia 37 have been murdered already this year—from human trafficking and repression arising from sexual orientation to the caste system, which inflicts such misery on Dalit people. Sometimes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is seen as an à la carte menu from which we may pick and choose. But these rights stand together. None should be emasculated; they are there for a reason.

Let me give one example. In a report by Members of your Lordships’ House, Article 18 was dubbed an “orphaned right”. Sidelining a right which upholds the right to belief, or indeed the right not to believe, is a serious error and the failure to uphold this orphaned right is leading to appalling consequences. As the noble Baroness the Minister rightly warned at Georgetown University last week, there is a need to “build political will” and to actively uphold the Human Rights Council resolutions on the treatment of minorities and tolerance towards other faiths. She said that in large parts of the world Christians “face extinction” and that senior politicians in countries like Pakistan have a “duty” to denounce persecution and to set a standard for tolerance. The noble Baroness is right and she is to be commended for leading by her own formidable example.

There are growing restrictions on freedom of conscience that range from the suffering of the Ahmadiyya Muslim communities in Pakistan and Indonesia to the plight of the Baha’is in Iran and Egypt; from the Rohingyas and other Muslims in Burma to Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims in China, and of course Christians in these countries as well as in countries as diverse as Egypt, Syria, Nigeria, Sudan, India, Eritrea and Cuba. But I stress that it is not only people of religion who suffer from violations of Article 18. In Indonesia a young man, Alexander Aan, has been jailed because he declared himself an atheist. For that, he is serving a two and a half year sentence in a remote prison in west Sumatra. Whatever our beliefs, the defence of Article 18 is therefore something which all of us should champion.

Among the organisations mandated to defend human rights that needs urgently to be strengthened is the International Criminal Court. It is mandated to prosecute individuals for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, but it has been wholly inadequate in its mechanisms of enforcement. Let us take the situation in sub-Saharan Africa. Last week I met Dr Kasereka Jo Lusi, a remarkable surgeon who works in Goma in eastern Congo. He told me that an average of 48 women are raped every single hour in the DRC. Twenty different militias carry out these horrors with impunity. Why is no one brought to justice and what can we do to promote a paradigm shift in attitudes and beliefs towards women and girls? In confronting impunity, why is it that Joseph Kony, who created the LRA killing machine responsible for terrible atrocities and indicted by the ICC, has not been brought to justice? Why does the indicted Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, remain at large? Bashir has been hosted by signatories of the Rome statute, which stipulates that they have a duty to co-operate with arrest warrants. What have we done to seek compliance?

Within the past month, I have made speeches in this House about Egypt and Sudan. Can the Minister give us her latest assessment of the continued aerial bombardment of civilian populations in Darfur and the Nuba mountains? There is also the plight of Copts. We saw the murder of two little girls at a recent Coptic wedding and the orgy of violence which I have described as Egypt’s Kristallnacht.

In May, I raised human rights abuses in Pakistan. If the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Cabinet Minister, who was well known to the Minister and who was charged with upholding the rights of minorities, remains unsolved, what faith can ordinary citizens have in the justice system? Why should potential attackers fear the law? What progress is being made in bringing his murderers to justice?

Last week, the Minister replied to my Written Question about the discovery of two mass graves in Sadad, in Syria. Yesterday, Human Rights Watch issued a new report on the 45 people killed there by the Islamist militias of al-Nusra Front and Daash. Are we any closer to verifying those accounts or to bringing to justice those who have used chemical weapons and those responsible for the daily violations of human rights using conventional weapons?

On Tuesday, I visited the protesters who, for 10 weeks, have been on hunger strike outside the American embassy in London, protesting about the massacre of Iranian democracy activists shot at close range at Camp Liberty in Iraq in September and who are highlighting the execution of 120,000 political prisoners, including women, in Iran since 1979. I hope the Minister will respond to the account of Tahar Boumedra, the former head of UNAMI, about the massacre in Camp Liberty, which my noble friend Lady Boothroyd, the noble Lords, Lord Carlile and Lord Waddington, I and others sent to William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, yesterday. Can she tell us when we last raised these issues with Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq? How did human rights violations figure in this month’s decision to upgrade our diplomatic relations with Iran?

As the Prime Minister discovered last week at CHOGM in Colombo, the judgments we make about when and how to engage on human rights questions can derail delicate relationships and even threaten the cohesion of admirable organisations such as the Commonwealth. What balance do we strike as we consider the complex questions of engagement?

I will conclude with the example of North Korea, which, with 200,000 people in its gulags and egregious violation of human rights, is sui generis—in a class of its own. Almost all of the rights set out in the Universal Declaration are denied. Only yesterday, the United Nations General Assembly’s human rights committee unanimously adopted a resolution citing the “systematic, widespread and grave” human rights violations in North Korea, including torture, the death penalty for political and religious reasons, and the network of political prison camps.

I chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, which, at evidence-gathering sessions, has regularly heard from escapees. Earlier this year, I published some of those accounts and, last month, I gave evidence to the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I have advocated the need for such an investigation for many years and pay tribute to Her Majesty’s Government and other Governments for working to secure its establishment. The inquiry has heard accounts of arbitrary imprisonment, torture, slave labour, rape, summary execution, forced abortion and medical experimentation. It has heard how three generations of a family can be dispatched to North Korea’s vast gulag system for such “crimes” as criticising the political leadership. It heard of a mother forced to drown her own baby in a bucket, of prisoners scavenging through excrement for morsels of food, of inmates forced to live on rodents, grasshoppers, lizards and grass, and of an inmate watching the public execution of his mother and brother. Mr Justice Kirby, the Supreme Court judge from Australia who chairs the commission of inquiry, said he wept on hearing many of these accounts.

I have visited North Korea four times, three times with my noble friend Lady Cox. On each occasion we have confronted the North Korean regime with its appalling human rights record. Precisely because of its isolation, I have long proposed a policy of constructive, but critical, engagement with North Korea, what I have termed, “Helsinki with a Korean face”, following the model of our approach to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in the Helsinki process—a robust stand on security and a critical stand on human rights but a willingness to put those issues on the table and talk face-to-face with the regime.

Only a week ago, the Times reported that the regime carried out 80 public executions in seven cities on one day—3 November—for alleged crimes of watching South Korean television dramas or owning Bibles. The Times said that they were allegedly tied to stakes, hooded and killed by machine gun. In the 1990s, 2 million people died of starvation in a country which puts its resources into a nuclear capability and one of the world’s largest standing armies. In January the Sunday Times reported that in two provinces, North Hwanghae and South Hwanghae, as many as 10,000 people had died of starvation and that the starving had resorted to cannibalism. I hope that the Minister will tell us whether we have raised these reports with the regime through our ambassador in Pyongyang, and describe our engagement with the United Nations commission of inquiry.

In March I had the opportunity to meet Daw Aung Sang Suu Kyi in Burma. She famously said:

“Please use your liberty to promote ours”.

Perhaps that is the purpose of a debate such as this and of our being Members of your Lordships’ House. She told me that the BBC’s Burmese Service made a major contribution to the process of opening up Burma. There is much that can be learnt from this and applied to North Korea. Burma is an example of a country where the right combination of international pressure, the flow of information and critical engagement has led to progress.

More than 12%—one report says it is as high as 27%—of those who have escaped from North Korea say that they have heard broadcasts from outside the country. The BBC World Service should make broadcasts to the Korean peninsula a priority. This would help to break the information blockade in the north and promote democracy, human rights and the English language. A popular campaign has been launched by young South Koreans calling for this. To facilitate BBC broadcasts from Korean soil, changes to South Korean law would be necessary. Was that discussed with President Park during her recent state visit? The Government have expressed sympathy for the proposal. Are we taking the idea forward?

In confronting each of the challenges that I have described, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides us with a map and with a compass. I think that today’s debate will mirror the FCO’s six human rights priorities: women’s rights; torture prevention; abolition of the death penalty; freedom of religious belief; business and human rights; and freedom of expression on the internet. Many will doubtless concur with the Foreign Secretary’s view that human rights must be “at the heart” of British foreign policy.

We need to do far more to ensure that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is less honoured in its breach, and I hope that today’s debate will demonstrate the determination of this free Parliament to insist on the centrality of the declaration to our approach to foreign affairs while also providing a voice for voiceless people. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, it was suggested during Question Time today that your Lordships have no business spending time on non-domestic issues. Twenty-six powerful speeches, including the Front-Bench speeches of the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, and the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, illustrate why this House should spend time on these issues, why it should bring its insightful, intelligent, well informed and wise contributions to these questions, why we have a duty to use the hard-won freedoms gained over 800 years since the promulgation of Magna Carta, and why we should use our liberties and freedoms to speak for the women in the Congo, the dissidents in Iran, the 300,000 in the gulags in North Korea or the 44 young people who were murdered by Boko Haram while sleeping in a dormitory in northern Nigeria.

Anyone who doubts the relevance or purpose of your Lordships’ House should read today’s Hansard. During my time here, I have felt deeply privileged to be able to work with many of your Lordships who have spoken in today’s debate. In four remarkable maiden speeches, we have heard about the oppression of gay people, about Putin’s Russia, about the need for an overarching strategy on human rights and about child labour.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of Cradley, reminded us that the welcome modern slavery Bill will appear later this year. More than 200 years ago, William Wilberforce and his friends believed that they had abolished slavery. Interestingly, he said, “Now we must turn our attention to the Dalits and the caste system”. These old evils still need to be combated, even as new giants emerge. Perhaps in our generation we might make caste history. Wilberforce, whose biographer is our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, once remarked that, having seen the evidence, “we cannot turn away”. Today, there has been no shortage of evidence and, like Wilberforce, we cannot turn away.

During our debate, we heard mention of the assault on the right to belief. It was mentioned in many speeches, including those of the two right reverend Prelates. I agree with Timothy Shah, who said:

“When people lose their religious freedom, they lose more than their freedom to be religious. They lose their freedom to be human”.

Lest anyone doubts the evidence, let them read the 160-page report that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office publishes every year on human rights violations. If a Select Committee produced that report, there would be a mechanism to debate it. It should be a given that every year we should have a full-scale debate on that annual report in both Houses. It should not be left to the vagaries of a ballot. Given the vast experience in your Lordships’ House on all our Benches, it is patently absurd that there is not an international affairs Select Committee, a foreign affairs Select Committee, where issues such those that we have been debating can be examined in detail.

The Foreign Secretary rightly said:

“While human rights are not the only consideration in forming a nation’s foreign policy, if we allow human rights to suffer while we pursue our legitimate national interest, we will in the long term have failed”.

We have seen remarkable change in our lifetime—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the beginnings of a peace process in Northern Ireland. Since coming to your Lordships’ House, I have been able to go to Burma on four occasions, three of them illegally. Eighteen months ago, I would not have believed that I would be able to address an open- air meeting of the National League for Democracy in Yangon. It is a small beginning, a small start and a welcome change.

It was said by Benjamin Franklin that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We have been vigilant today but, as so many have said, we must persist, persist and persist. We must use our freedoms on behalf of those whose freedoms are cruelly denied.

Motion agreed.

Food Security Summit

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Wednesday 25th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

The noble Baroness is right that prices for maize and soya beans have now exceeded 2007-08 highs. It is too early to say how rising world prices will affect the poor in developing countries, because production for 2012 is still expected to exceed consumption. Regarding her point on ethanol, the Government are committed to ensuring that biofuel production does not jeopardise food security in the way that she indicates. Biofuels can, of course, play a positive role in promoting development, provided their production benefits smallholder farmers. The focus of the event in August is on child malnutrition.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, in the context where a malnourished child is eight times more likely to die than a child of normal weight, and where 3 million children are estimated to die of malnutrition every year, will the Minister undertake to look at the reports of our previous ambassador in North Korea, Peter Hughes, and our present ambassador, Karen Wolstenholme, who have reported on stunted growth, especially among children, in a country where 2 million died during the famine in the 1990s? Will she accept that, however much we may despise a particular ideology, it should be no part of our policy, or indeed that of the United States or other nations, to try to drive a country into submission by using food as a weapon of war?

[Baroness Northover]

The noble Lord is right to say that there is a very high level of malnutrition across the world, which has a terrible impact upon the health of children. That is why the Government have focused very much on trying to ensure that this issue is addressed. I take on board what he says about this report. I will make sure that DfID sees it, if it has not already done so; I should think it is highly likely that it has already. It is extremely important that we ensure that food—and support for the ability of people to feed themselves—is available worldwide, whatever the regime.

Sudan and South Sudan

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

Yesterday, the special envoy to the Secretary-General briefed the Security Council on compliance by Sudan, South Sudan and the SPLM-North with Security Council Resolution 2046. He is keeping a close watch on the extent to which the ceasefire is not being adhered to. He identified a small window for restarting negotiations between Sudan and South Sudan. President Mbeke is travelling to Khartoum and Juba to engage with the parties and convene a meeting between them as soon as possible. We, the US and France have confirmed our readiness to consider sanctions if necessary.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, does the Minister concur with the view of Dr Mukesh Kapila, who was the high representative of this country and the United Nations in Sudan, that the second genocide of the 21st century is unfolding in South Kordofan? How can the Government continue to do business as usual with a regime that is led by someone who has been indicted for war crimes—crimes against humanity—by the International Criminal Court? How can we simply sustain diplomatic relations as though it is business as usual?

[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, it is not business as usual but, as the noble Lord knows, the UK Government engage with all Governments in the hope of bringing about the changes that the noble Lord would wish to see. In embassy involvement, the only countries from which officials have been withdrawn are Syria and Iran, which was necessary for the protection of staff. In all other areas, including North Korea, there is engagement, but it is not business as usual. With regard to the crimes to which the noble Lord referred, it is clear that there have been indiscriminate attacks on civilians and war crimes. Indeed, President al-Bashir is indicted by the International Criminal Court. It is worth bearing in mind, too, that the case of Charles Taylor shows that international criminal justice is not time-limited.

South Sudan

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds. I join in paying tribute to my noble friend Lady Cox for her heroic humanitarian work over such a long, sustained time in Sudan. I will also follow her by talking entirely about South Kordofan. The noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, referred to Dr Mukesh Kapila CBE, a former senior British official and former United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Sudan. Earlier this month, he told parliamentarians from both Houses at a meeting which I attended that in South Kordofan the second genocide of the 21st century is now unfolding, with more than 1 million people affected as a regime systemically kills its own people. He also reminded us of the folly of seeking to appease the regime in Khartoum or of placing such credence in agreements about boundaries or citizenship as we have done in the past. He told us not to be fooled by the Government of Sudan and that, despite many promises on humanitarian access and civilian protection, al-Bashir’s regime has never adhered to one single agreement that it has signed.

During Oral Questions last Thursday, I asked the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, to reconsider the Government’s policy of maintaining full diplomatic relations with Sudan and conducting business as usual with a regime ruled over by,

“mass murderers and fugitives from justice”.—[Official Report, 22/3/12; col. 1023.]

Field Marshal Omar al-Bashir and South Kordofan’s governor Ahmed Mohammed Haroun are both wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur, a region which I have visited, where more than 300,000 people were killed and some two million people were displaced. Surely, as a matter of principle, where a head of state is indicted by the ICC, we should radically review our diplomatic relations. I hope the Minister can tell us what we are doing to assist the ICC in enforcing arrest warrants in cases such as those of al-Bashir and Haroun.

I would contrast the situation with that of Syria. I hope that, at the very minimum, Her Majesty’s Government will consider at least the downgrading of our diplomatic relations, the freezing of assets and the imposition of travel and other sanctions. Either this is the second genocide of the 21st century unfolding, or it is not. Either those responsible for the first genocide, who are now responsible for the second, are the men who have just been mentioned, or they are not. Either they are indicted by the ICC or they are not. Either it is business as usual, or it is not.

During his evidence, Dr Kapila described the situation in South Kordofan. He said,

“we heard an Antonov above us. Women and children started running and going into the nooks and caves of a mountain, a small hill rather … We saw a burned-out village. As we left the border there was burned place after burned place after burned place. There was hardly a person to be seen”.

He told us that this normally food-rich state faces starvation because the attacks have forced the people from their fields, and to ward off hunger they are now eating next season’s seeds. There are an estimated 300,000 people now internally displaced, and 20,000 to 30,000 refugees.

Where are we in all this? Although the United Kingdom has just assumed the presidency of the United Nations Security Council, the British Government and Foreign Secretary have said little or nothing about these events. I first questioned Ministers about this unfolding tragedy and the complicity of United Nations peacekeepers, who sent fleeing victims to their deaths, on 21 June last year. The Government replied,

“Reports of such atrocities will have to be investigated and, if they prove to be true, those responsible will need to be brought to account”—[Official Report, 21/6/11; col. WA 294.]

Needless to say, no-one has been. In July, I asked what action the United Nations was taking in South Kordofan under Resolution 1590, which requires particular attention to be given to the protection of vulnerable groups. Last September, I raised reports of aerial bombardment. In November, the Government told me,

“we continue … to seek urgent access to those most affected by the conflict”—[Official Report, 9/11/11; col. WA 66.]

Yet there has been no access and no referral of these depredations to the International Criminal Court. Those responsible—led by indicted war criminals—for crimes against humanity continue to enjoy full diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom. That simply cannot be right.

Sahel

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

This is currently very high on the UK’s agenda and those of the EU and the UN. There will shortly be a debate on this in the UN, as the noble Baroness probably knows. I spoke to relevant officials this morning and I can assure the noble Baroness that they are acutely aware of the problem of the weapons there. As she says, people have come back who are no longer sending remittances home and themselves need to be supported.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, the Minister has given the House the welcome news that the British Government are providing 68,000 children with food aid. Did she see UNICEF’s report last week, which said that 1 million children in the Sahel region are at risk of immediate malnutrition? How are we directing our aid, particularly towards the children who are at risk at this time?

[Baroness Northover]

UNICEF is supported by DfID, as the noble Lord knows. As I mentioned, the United Kingdom is working bilaterally but it is also working multilaterally through the EU and a number of NGOs, and is acutely aware that there are 1 million children at risk.

Developing Countries: Free and Fair Elections

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

The first thing that I would emphasise is perhaps a sense of humility. If noble Lords bear in mind how long it took us to democratise from 1832 to 1929—in terms of the franchise for women—it is not surprising that, in some of these fragile states, it takes a long time to ensure that the elections are carried out fairly. Positive accounts are coming from the DRC about the elections, as the account of the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, bears out. As I said, various concerns are being monitored, particularly by the United States. We are in close contact. My noble friend Lord Howell answered on this subject the other day and the Minister for Africa is also pressing on the matter. We share those concerns and we are taking this forward, but we need to bear in mind the difficulties.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, reverting to the specific Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, about the DRC and the outcome of the elections, if the delegation that has been in London this week from opposition parties in the DRC is right and it is found that the elections have been entirely gerrymandered, will Her Majesty’s Government refuse to recognise the legitimacy of President Kabila and his Government? What about the opposition parties and their leaders who have been imprisoned in the DRC since the election and the closure of their television and radio stations and other media outlets? What have the Government to say about that?

[Baroness Northover]

One has to bear in mind the interests of all involved. It is striking that none of the observation missions—again, I make reference to the one that noble Lord, Lord McConnell, was on—judged that the overall result of the presidential election would have been changed by the irregularities that have been flagged up. However, it is clearly essential that the DRC electoral commission takes the necessary steps to investigate and address all reported irregularities.