Operation Sophia: A Failed Mission (EUC Report)

Baroness Suttie Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the excellent and thoughtful speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, one based on experience. The noble Baroness may be the new girl on our committee, but I speak for the whole committee in saying that we look forward very much to her presence.

I begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for her excellent work in chairing the EU External Affairs Sub-Committee. I congratulate her on a detailed and comprehensive speech on the report on Operation Sophia; she asked a number of questions, many of which I can now score off my speech this afternoon. It is also important to acknowledge, as the noble Baroness did, the work done by the committee staff in steering through these often highly complex issues, ensuring that we heard the views of a range of experts and compiled and analysed the evidence before us effectively.

As the noble Baroness indicated, the report is a follow-up to the earlier report, tabled two years ago, by the same committee when the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, chaired it. I have been a member of that committee for exactly three years, and I have to say that both this report and its predecessor provide exactly the sort of critical thinking and scrutiny that committees should do in our role in providing effective oversight of government/EU decision-making.

For as long as we remain a member of the European Union, it is important that we should on occasion play the role of critical friend. Where EU policies result in unintended consequences, we should point them out, as I believe we do very effectively in the report before us this afternoon. While carrying out this inquiry, we had some intense conversations about the conclusions to be reached in this report. Understandably, there was some anxiety about one of the main conclusions, which we did not want to be misinterpreted in any sense as saying that we should leave people to drown in the Mediterranean Sea. There is a vital role for search and rescue, as tragically this week has again illustrated all too clearly, with the migrant ship trying and failing to dock in Italy. Indeed, the report describes search and rescue as a “vital humanitarian obligation”, but as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, and others have pointed out, the stated aim of the Operation Sophia mission is,

“contributing to the disruption of the business model of human smuggling and trafficking networks in the Southern Central Mediterranean”.

It is in that regard that we believe the mission has failed.

The vast majority of the witnesses we heard from during the inquiry acknowledged that the mission has been inadvertently assisting people smugglers by providing a level of certainty that the people being trafficked across the Mediterranean will be rescued by naval vessels if their boats get into trouble. So, instead of using stronger wooden boats, all too frequently the people smugglers are now using unseaworthy dinghies, which are often seriously overcrowded, making it extremely unlikely that they will be able to cross this wide and unpredictable stretch of the Mediterranean Sea. Both the report before us this afternoon and the earlier report from 2016 concluded that,

“a naval mission is the wrong tool to tackle irregular migration which begins onshore”,

and that by the time people have set sail from the coast of Libya,

“it is too late to undermine the business of people smuggling”.

I want to make three additional points in this afternoon’s debate. First, the mass movement of people, caused by war, famine and economic necessity, is an issue that will not go away. As the world population continues to grow, and resources become ever more scarce, these trends will continue to grow in the years ahead. According to the United Nations, in 2015 there were 244 million international migrants globally. Additionally, over 65.6 million people were displaced, mainly by conflicts. Displacement due to climate change and disasters has on average affected 22.5 million people since 2008.

This mass migration of people is unfortunately fuelling the rise of populism in Europe—most notably perhaps in Hungary with Viktor Orbán’s right-wing Government, and in Italy with the newly constituted populist Government. Perhaps that is not surprising because Hungary and Italy are two of the EU member states most directly affected by this mass movement of people on their land and sea borders.

However, we in this country have also witnessed migration becoming an increasingly emotive issue, particularly during the EU referendum campaign with those now perhaps notorious posters used by the leave campaign showing boats filled with migrants. The fears of people have been fuelled by myths and misunderstandings in some of the media, with the rise of migration and the mass movement of people being conflated with the rise of individual acts of terrorism, which in reality often have deeply complex and psychological causes. In the context of the UK, there is a certain irony in the same media that encourage myths about migration also campaigning against downstream assistance and development aid for the source countries of this migration.

My second point is about the people smugglers. This is now a billion-pound business peddling in human misery, vulnerability, and the economically motivated movement of people, and—in the context of Operation Sophia—the chaos and political instability of Libya. According to the European Migrant Smuggling Centre, in 2015, migrant smuggling networks made between €4.7 billion and €5.7 billion trafficking people to Europe, according to its 2017 report.

A Syrian colleague and friend of mine has told me stories of how social media are now extensively used by the people smugglers to advertise their services, indicating the latest, safest and most effective routes, with a price list attached. It surely must be possible to trace these people smugglers more effectively and to prosecute those at the top of the chain. Can the Minister say what international co-operation is currently taking place to follow and trace the international bank transfers involved?

My third and final point is to recall the source of the name Operation Sophia. Baby Sophia was born on 24 August 2015 on a German frigate to a Somali mother who was rescued alongside another 453 migrants and was named after the German princess of the same name. Behind each of the statistics on migration are individual human stories and lives. The individuals on the boat trying to land in Italy this week, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, said, included pregnant women and babies. These are hugely complex issues, which cannot be solved by any one member state; they require an international approach by the EU and the wider international community. Merely hoping that these issues will go away and attempting to pull up the drawbridge will just allow the people smugglers’ business to flourish.

Sadly, this well-intentioned mission—that is, Operation Sophia—is in reality further assisting these international criminals in exploiting often desperate people in their quest for a better life. The mission should and must be re-examined in light of the facts, while maintaining the vital role of search and rescue. For that reason, I commend the report’s recommendations to the House.