That this House takes note of (1) the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimate that 82.4 million people are displaced worldwide, 42 per cent of whom are children, and 32 per cent of whom are refugees, and (2) the case for an urgent international response to address the root causes of mass displacement.
My Lords, I declare my interests as a trustee of the charity Arise and as co-chair or officer of a number of relevant all-party groups. Seven years ago, I opened a Cross-Bench debate on the challenge posed by the wave of refugees leaving Africa and Asia and pleaded for a co-ordinated, urgent international response. I thank my noble friends for once again recognising the importance of this subject, and express my thanks to all noble Lords speaking today, especially the Minister, and to the Library for its excellent briefing note.
The debate is about push factors rather than the pull factors, which have dominated the consideration that we have been giving to the Nationality and Borders Bill. The Motion draws attention to the estimate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that 82.4 million people are displaced worldwide, 42% of whom are children and 32% of whom are refugees. It calls for an urgent international response to address the root causes, recognising that this is a complex strategic problem which cannot be addressed without systematic and sustained international co-operation.
Those push factors involve wars and conflicts, persecution and terrorism, destitution, corruption, instability, grinding poverty, man-made phenomena such as climate change, and natural disasters, which drive people out of their homes, communities and countries, risking their lives in doing so. It is about people such as Harem Pirot, a 25-year-old Iraqi Kurd, one of 27 people, mostly Iraqi Kurds, who perished five weeks ago in the world’s busiest shipping lane, having set off from the coast of northern France in a flimsy dinghy. It is about Khazal Ahmed and her three children, who also perished that day in the biggest known number of fatalities in one channel tragedy since refugees began making the perilous journey to Britain. It is about people being displaced from Afghanistan, Burma, Tigray, Nigeria, Venezuela, Eritrea, Syria, Iraq and Sudan, or illegally repatriated by China to North Korea.
To keep our own position in perspective, just 0.65% of the world’s refugees are in the United Kingdom. We take about half the number of asylum seekers that we took 20 years ago. By contrast, the top five countries hosting refugees have more than 9 million in their territories. Of the 82 million displaced people, 55 million are said to be living in internal displacement because of conflict or displacement. Conflict in Syria is in its 12th year. There are 13.5 million displaced Syrians, representing more than half of Syria’s population; 6.7 million Syrian refugees are hosted in 128 countries; and 80% of all Syrian refugees are in neighbouring countries such as Turkey but, like Belarus, its record in using refugees as cannon fodder, and in creating them in the first place, is appalling.
Two years ago, I visited Bardarash refugee camp in northern Iraq, where Kurdish families from Syria had fled after their homes were bombed by Turkish aeroplanes. A mother of four told me that
My Lords, it is always a challenge to follow the noble Lord, Lord Alton, because he covers such a broad range with such expertise. In my brief comments, I will cover just one small matter. Before I do, I draw attention to my register of interests and the matters declared there.
I want to look not at government but, as was indicated in an article in the Guardian on Monday, at the involvement of major corporations and businesses—in this case, Coca-Cola. I cited Coca-Cola as sponsor of the Beijing Games next month and asked what it is doing there. Why is it there? Should it be there? I think I am correctly interpreting the comments that I have received about my proposal that those who consume Coca-Cola—and I happen to—should not consume it for the next two months. I am pleased that people such as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans have indicated that they take the same view on that intervention.
Sporting events go to a particular location because they know they will get the finance. That comes, in large part, not from individuals but from sponsors. Coca-Cola is pouring tens of millions, possibly $100 million or more, into the Beijing Olympics. It therefore has questions to answer, and they have to come from the top, from Atlanta, where Coca-Cola is based. I am asking a question of what is probably the most centralised company with which I have ever worked, Coca-Cola, and of its chief executive, who happens to be a British national. Will he answer the question of what it is doing in Beijing?
Last night, I went on to the web page of the Coca- Cola Company in Atlanta. It has six headings; one is “Better Shared Future”. How ironic that one of the five items it identifies is human rights. It says:
“Respect for human rights is a fundamental value of ours.”
My Lords, I believe the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, has scratched. Therefore, rather than winding for the Liberal Democrats, I am not only opening but speaking a lot earlier, and am down to four minutes, rather than the 10 that I was anticipating. So I will confine my remarks primarily to the situation in Afghanistan.
As my noble friend Lord Alton said in opening, this is a debate about massed forced migration. It is about push factors, not pull factors. It is not about why individuals might seek to come to the United Kingdom, Germany or other countries, but about the factors that are forcing people to leave their homes, countries and regions of origin.
The numbers of those people who feel the need to flee are absolutely breath-taking. The pressure that those people who are refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced—84 million people globally—put on neighbouring countries can be significant. Those who seem to think that the UK has too many asylum seekers—people seeking refuge here—forget that in Turkey, one in 23 people is a refugee. In Jordan it is one in 14 and in Lebanon one in eight. Millions and millions of people feel they need to leave, not to seek a better life in a general materialistic sense but because they are fleeing war, poverty, genocide, hate speech in Myanmar, and Hindu nationalism, which is forcing more than a million Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.
In mid-2021, the UNHCR believed that 2.6 million Afghans had already fled their homes. That was before Kabul fell to the Taliban. How many more tens and hundreds of thousands of people have now moved? Could the Minister tell us what assessment Her Majesty’s Government have made of the impact of the US withdrawal on individuals and their families in Afghanistan—not just the date that the 20,000 people under the ACRS might expect to come here, but how many people are being forced to flee? As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, pointed out, 42% of displaced people are children, and in Afghanistan those people fleeing the Taliban because they worked with the US and the United Kingdom are not just individual men—they would very often be men—but their wives, sisters, mothers and children. What are Her Majesty’s Government doing to ensure that those people who worked with us, for us and alongside us can be given some sense that they can get out and that they will not keep living in holes without any money? When I say “holes”, I mean that. There are individual cases of people who worked for the British Council saying that they no longer have anywhere to live and that they are on a Taliban list. What are Her Majesty’s Government doing at least to deal with this aspect of push migration?
My Lords, the UN has defined forcibly displaced persons as those who are
“forced to move, within or across borders, due to armed conflict, persecution, terrorism, human rights violations and abuses, violence, the adverse effects of climate change, natural disasters, development projects or a combination of these factors”.
As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, outlined in his very important and moving speech, there are 82.4 million people across the world in this situation. It is a truly shocking and awful predicament and one we must take urgent action to address.
However, one group that often gets ignored and yet very often ends up being displaced as per the UN definition is widows. A conservative estimate by the organisation Widows for Peace through Democracy is that there are 258 million widows. This includes half widows: those married to missing or forcibly disappeared husbands. There are also estimated to be 1.5 million child widows. We know that these estimates are conservative as very little data is collected internationally on widows. What do the Government intend to do to improve data collection on widows globally?
Widows very often end up being displaced and forced to move from their homes. The human rights of widows around the world are all too often breached, and when their husbands die they too often lose their homes and are denied any form of welfare or income. These women are often vulnerable to sexual exploitation and trafficking, including child widows, who may be very young.
Like most displaced people, widows often lack legal documentation, and they may end up struggling to seek asylum in countries such as the UK. In most cases, these women will not make it that far once they have been displaced.
The Covid-19 pandemic has meant that there are far more widows in the world today. Sadly, many will find themselves displaced and in a very difficult situation. A recent World Bank report on the subject found that widows in Africa faced lower welfare and nutritional status. Again, there has been very little research into this, so the data we have is extremely limited.
12:56 pm
The Lord Bishop of Leeds
My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on securing this debate. I am grateful to him for personifying the issue by naming individuals. I visited camps for internally displaced people in Iraqi Kurdistan several years ago. I am still haunted by the faces, not always the voices. When you are confronted with a 12 year-old boy who had not spoken since being forced to watch his father be beheaded outside his front door, then it is the faces, not the voices. They haunt me.
As Desmond Tutu observed, although it is possibly misquoted, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” What he actually might have said is: find out who or what is pushing then in. Yesterday in this House we discussed the Nationality and Borders Bill. That legislation focuses on asylum and refugees almost entirely through the lens of deterrence and enforcement. It contains a lot of measures to make it harder to prove refugee status and to prevent pull factors, but there is nothing at all on going upstream to find out why they are falling in or being pushed in. This debate is therefore critical in this context. Until we can take action to prevent people falling in, all the deterrence policies in the world are unlikely to stop an ever greater flow of displaced peoples. What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object? That is what we are talking about.
In this context, I will add a few remarks on climate and displacement. While the UK retains COP presidency and the Government are in the business of rethinking international norms around refugee law, perhaps we might hear from the Minister what thought, if any, has been given to climate displacement and refugee policy. There is no such thing, legally speaking, as a climate refugee. There is a growing wave of people displaced by climate and weather events. Of the 82.4 million people displaced worldwide, the UNHCR reports that about a quarter are forcibly displaced by sudden-onset weather-related hazards and thousands more from slow-onset hazards linked to climate change. Tens of millions of people are likely to be displaced over the next two or three decades due in large measure to climate change impacts.
These changes have been recognised for some time as a long-term driver of displacement, especially in the absence of appropriate mitigation and adaptation support for communities. Some £100 billion a year in climate finance was promised in the COP process, but it has not been delivered. This target is not likely to be met until 2023, so there is not just a shortfall in the finance but it is skewed in favour of mitigation, such as renewable energy projects, rather than adaptation, such as flood defences and so on. Global south nations have been calling for more funding for adaptation, and some progress was made in the Glasgow climate pact when developed nations were called on to double, at least, their collective provision of climate finance for adaptation from 2019 levels by 2025. This falls a long way short of what is needed. We need an urgent international response on all these fronts.
My Lords, in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for giving us this opportunity to debate what is, and ought to be, a top priority for our national agenda and the global agenda, I also thank him for, and congratulate him on, introducing the debate in his usual well-researched and comprehensive way. I fully support his suggested way forward. I also thank the House of Lords Library for the excellent briefing on which I have relied, since, I must confess, I have not read the full United Nations report.
I wish to concentrate on the second part of the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Alton: the case for an urgent international response to address the root causes of mass displacement. The United Nations’ definition of those root causes is important and broad but does not apparently include the breakdown or failure of proper democratic systems. This has occurred in a number of countries—I cite Venezuela and Haiti as examples, although in the latter country natural disasters have undoubtedly added to the chaos there. If people feel that the rule of law no longer exists and that their vote does not count, they are just as likely to feel they have no future in their home country as someone persecuted for religious or other freedoms.
The other omission is the failure to deal not just with what happens to people when they reach their final destination country but with how they get there. Any international response must include consideration of how people move from A to B. Not everyone can afford to fly; we have witnessed on our television screens, for example, the masses of people moving on foot through central American countries and Mexico towards the United States. I am told that many Africans now cross the Atlantic in order to join those human chains. I know that there are Venezuelans, most of whom have fled to Colombia, and others who have had to make their way through Brazil and Bolivia in order to reach Chile. Some of these people may be classed as economic migrants, but how are the transit countries supposed to distinguish? Therefore, I believe that any international response must take account of the needs of transit countries, to enable them to cope with these influxes. Any international response must take into account the many unaccompanied children and deal with the people traffickers who mislead and exploit vulnerable people.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for enabling this debate and for his excellent introduction. I refer noble Lords to my interests in the register, and I must apologise to the House for omitting to make this reference when I asked a Question on 16 November.
The numbers cited are vast and shameful. Each number is a human being, like you and me, with the same physical and emotional needs. They are, however, far more resilient than most of us, cut off from their country and culture, often having suffered the trauma of war, civil unrest, hunger and persecution. Most have tenacity, talents and potential for which the world is in great need, but this is squandered at enormous cost to the individuals themselves and the world. We are talking about more than 30 million children, many of whom have few opportunities for education, little or no hope and stunted dreams. It is unconscionable that this situation is allowed in the 21st century when we have the knowledge, wealth and capacity to address the issues that cause mass displacement. Unless we address the root causes now, including climate change, the crisis will grow.
It is not a crisis for us, the developed, wealthy world; it is a crisis for the people who are displaced and often for the countries from whence they came. Our integrated but unequal world is desperate for an urgent international response but global leadership is severely lacking—and I suggest that it is certainly not going to come from this country at the moment. We have a moral duty to act, but it is also in our self-interest. The situation in Afghanistan is a tragic but perfect illustration. Unless the world comes together to provide the necessary humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, the whole country will be living in absolute poverty, with millions of Afghans faced with starvation, and thousands will continue to seek refuge in other countries, including the UK.
My Lords, with respect, I remind noble Lords of the four-minute Back-Bench speaking time. We are running over and obviously, that eats into the Minister’s ability to respond.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, not only for securing this debate but for once again being a prophetic voice among us and reminding us of the serious moral challenge we face on this issue.
It is important to begin by stating the obvious, because it is so often easy to forget the obvious. If the root cause of the refugee problem is conflict, the first priority is to prevent that conflict in the first place and to bring conflicts that have started to a halt. This highlights the need for wise foreign policy and good diplomacy. Take the issue almost on our doorstep, the tension now gearing up over Ukraine and the number of people who could flee if a serious conflict broke out there. The priority is, as it always was, good statecraft and serious diplomacy.
Secondly, at the moment the main burden of the refugee problem is being borne in the middle to low-income countries on the borders of those countries where there is violence. I am no fan of Erdoğan’s Turkey, for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, outlined, but Turkey is at present hosting 3.7 million refugees, mainly from Syria. We also note that Uganda has nearly 1.5 million, mainly from South Sudan, and Pakistan also nearly 1.5 million, mainly from Afghanistan. In Europe it is the poorer, smaller countries such as Greece that have to bear the real burden and responsibility for those who cross the Mediterranean.
There are two reasons in particular for giving attention and support to these countries: first, as mentioned, because they bear the main burden; and secondly because it is highly desirable that refugees are settled back in their own countries as soon as it is safe to do so. They are much more likely to be able to do that if they are temporarily placed nearby. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi was absolutely right in emphasising these two points when he said:
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“the war planes came at four o’clock. As they dropped their bombs and chemicals many children were burnt. Some were killed. We all started to run. I just want to go home with my children, but everything was destroyed, and we would be slaughtered.”
Another Bardarash refugee, Hamid, described how he saw people choking as their homes were burned:
“Children were throwing up and we had to leave the injured behind as we fled.”
Hamza, whose wife, mother of their three year-old daughter, was killed, asked me:
“Where is the justice in letting Erdoğan force Kurdish families to flee their homes? The international community did nothing about it.”
When did it become acceptable for a NATO country to break the Geneva conventions and, potentially, the chemical weapons convention, illegally occupy territory, ethnically cleanse a population and face no investigation, little censure, no Security Council resolution and no consequences? Does it matter that such actions add to the millions of people already caught up in such miserable displacement, denying them the chance just to go home?
As one of the four sponsors of the 2016 amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, on child refugees, it particularly disturbs me that of the 82 million displaced people, 42% are children. Children make up almost 25% of those seeking asylum in the UK and almost half of all identified potential victims of modern slavery or exploitation in our own national referral mechanism. Nelson Mandela was right when he observed:
“The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children.”
When a Kurdish child drowns in the English Channel, a Syrian child drowns in the Aegean, or an Eritrean or Nigerian child drowns in the Mediterranean, we must ask what drives families and their children to such desperation? Some refugees spend their entire lives in sprawling, squalid, makeshift camps. Some I visited decades ago are still there.
As a young MP I travelled to Lebanon with the late Lord Avebury. In 1981 we visited Palestinian refugee camps at Shatila and Sabra, where a terrible massacre occurred in 1982. Those camps, two of 68 Palestinian refugee camps, were a perfect breeding and recruiting ground for terror, sucking up people who believed that the future held nothing for them. Shatila, Sabra, Bardarash and places like them are a symbol of the breakdown of global leadership. Millions are paying the price of our abysmal failure to hold perpetrators of atrocities to account.
In Northern Iraq, I met some of the displaced religious and ethnic minorities, including Yazidis, Assyrians and Chaldean Christians, displaced from the Nineveh Plains, Mosul, Sinjar and elsewhere during the ISIS genocide. Despite the best efforts in 2016 of my noble friend Lady Cox, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and myself, we failed to persuade the Government that a genocide was under way and there is still no ad hoc tribunal to bring to justice those responsible. The veteran diplomat, Dr Richard Haass, is right that in a world of bad options,
“not acting can be every bit as consequential as acting”.
The abysmal failure to act on genocide and atrocity crimes is a major push factor in creating displacement, from Burma to northern Nigeria and from Tigray to Somalia. In Afghanistan, the chaotic withdrawal of the US and the return to power of Taliban death squads has resulted in thousands of people fleeing, whether in official state and NGO-organised evacuations or by resorting to smugglers and human traffickers. The most at risk include thousands of people from religious or belief minorities, including small groups of Christians, Sikhs, Ahmadis, Uighurs and others substantial in number, such as the Hazara Shias. Women are generally at risk, especially those who have been in powerful positions, including women judges, lawyers and politicians, and women in medicine, education and journalism. The list goes on.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, will speak later. She has done such admirable work, with a Kindertransport-inspired airlift of 103 at-risk women and their families—close to 500 people airlifted on private charter planes to Greece, which has been a lily pad. However, as their temporary visas come to expire, countries such as the UK continue to delay implementing their promised resettlement programme. Can the Minister tell us what has caused the delay and when it will be resolved?
Can he also spell out how he is responding to the Bishop of Truro’s 2019 report, commissioned by the then Foreign Secretary? It found that in some regions the “level and nature” of the persecution of Christians was
“arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide according to that adopted by the UN”.
What assessment has the Minister made of FoRB as a driver pushing refugees such as the Pakistani Ahmadis and Christians, whom I have seen for myself in refugee detention centres in south-east Asia? Will he tell us what is being done by our embassies to help resettle religious minorities and what priority is being given to combating persecution and upholding Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a major push factor all over the world?
In south-east Asia, I also visited Karen refugee camps established decades ago, which are now seeing new influxes as Burmese ethnic minorities are subjected to fierce attacks by the Tatmadaw following their illegal coup. Many are living on the run in the jungles of Myanmar. In Burma, I met Rohingya Muslims and visited a burned-out village. Even before the coup, 800,000 Rohingya Muslims were subjected to genocide and forced to flee to Bangladesh, while Christian minorities in Chin state and elsewhere have been, and continue to be, subjected to terrible atrocity crimes. Will the Government consider providing urgently needed humanitarian aid to internally displaced peoples through cross-border delivery?
In autumn 2020, the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and I raised in this House the consequences of the conflict in Tigray. One year later, just before Christmas, the United Nations Human Rights Council established a UN inquiry that will monitor the crimes and preserve the evidence for future generations, with notable votes cast against doing that by China, Russia and Eritrea. Welcome though that motion is, it will do nothing to reverse the mass displacement of 2 million people forced to flee their homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are in famine-like conditions and are starving. The catastrophic conflict continues to expand, devastating the whole region. If the political will had been there, these atrocities, the pain, suffering, displacement and much more besides could have been prevented
Meanwhile, the World Bank and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, along with the Minister himself in evidence given at a recent hearing of the International Relations and Defence Select Committee, have warned that rising sea levels and climate change will displace millions more. Post COP 26, how are we preparing to meet that challenge? How are we ensuring that displaced people and refugees, already at the bottom of the pile, are receiving Covid vaccinations—a point raised by my noble friend Lord Hylton during Questions today—and are not part of what the United Nations High Commission for Refugees calls
“a substantial vaccine equity gap”?
What assessment have we made of its estimate that 30 million more people will be facing hunger by the end of this decade than if the pandemic had not occurred? A point often referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, and others is our cuts to overseas aid, the subject of a Cross-Bench debate on 1 July 2021. That, for many, has been a final blow.
The UK has some generous and worthwhile initiatives, but clearly we cannot meet these interlinked challenges alone or by hoping that the problem will simply go away. It will not. With our allies, global Britain needs to drive this issue right up the international agenda. We should be convening summits, commissioning hard-headed humanitarian solutions, tackling the problem at its roots and creating secure, safe havens in which people can prosper and make new lives. We need something on the imaginative scale of the US-inspired 1948 Marshall aid programme, which rebuilt western Europe.
Along the coast of north Africa, we should be building new Carthages—a series of new, UN-protected, small city states—using brilliant Israeli and other western technology to create renewable energy for water desalination, electricity and the production of food. If this was done under a UN mandate, it might turn the UN into something other than a spectator.
Instead of a well-thought-out international plan of action, we have near silence in the UK’s 2021 integrated review. If we are to be what the review calls “a force for good”, we need to turn the rhetoric into deeds. In addition to the altruistic reasons for doing so, the Government should follow the logic of their own argument when they say that, for the cost of helping 3,000 refugees who arrive in Britain, the UK could help 100,000 refugees in camps overseas. It is what the Norwegian Government do; their Minister for Immigration and Integration, Sylvi Listhaug, believes not only that the rich world has a moral duty to help refugees but that the deployment of 1% of its GDP on foreign aid should be used to tackle the refugee problem at source. Other countries should be persuaded by us, but we need to lead by example.
It is an echo of a remark made in a debate in 1940 by the formidable independent MP, Eleanor Rathbone, who established the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees and argued that responding to the plight of refugees was
“not only in the interests of humanity and of the refugees, but in the interests of security itself”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/7/1940; col. 1212.]
Today’s Motion is about facing up to the global duty to understand why mass migration is rapidly on the rise and how we in the rich North need to respond not by endless barriers but by serious and intentional economic, social and democratic investment to support building lives of dignity, way beyond our borders. It is in their interests and in the common interests of humanity, but it is in our interests too. If we fail to do this, there will be many more fatal tragedies, many more Harem Pirots and Khazal Ahmeds. There will be many more camps, and many more lives devoid of human dignity and opportunity. I beg to move.
Tell that to the Uighurs and to the people in Hong Kong, who are losing their security on a daily, or hourly, basis. On the same page of the Coca-Cola corporation’s main website, it says:
“Dedicated to using our voice and position to support equality, justice and universal values across various diverse groups.”
Tell that to the Uighurs and the people of Hong Kong. Mr Quincey, as chief executive of the Coca-Cola corporation, could you please explain to the public at large why those phrases are on your web page? Can you make them stand up?
I ask that question of Mr Quincey, who, as I say, is a British national. He spent part of his youth at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He was educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham. Some time in the next two months, I would like him to provide one hour to a panel of students from Dartmouth and King Edward’s explaining what Coca-Cola is doing to protect the fundamental rights of individuals in China.
In conclusion, a phrase that Coca-Cola uses is about achieving “share of throat”. The throats of the Uighurs and the residents of Hong Kong are silent. I would like Mr Quincey to explain to the students of Dartmouth and King Edward’s in Birmingham why.
Some 27 years after the Beijing declaration on gender equality, it seems that we still have not come that far regarding the rights of widows internationally. In addressing the root causes of mass displacement, we must not forget women and in particular widows, who all too often find themselves in these terrible situations.
I have focused my remarks on climate displacement but there is a thread in this: that our national approach to refugees and asylum is doomed to failure unless we acknowledge, understand and confront the push factors that are driving displacement. This cannot be accomplished simply by deterrence and enforcement, no matter how draconian the regime that we install.
The movement of peoples is not new. Those of us who have had the privilege of visiting the fantastic museum of anthropology in Mexico City have seen how the Americas were peopled way before 1492 and European colonisation. Modern communications enable us to be immediately more conscious of what is going on. That knowledge must lead us to find some way to improve and resolve these issues throughout the world. It must be a priority for global co-operation. The United Nations is the global organisation we subscribe to in order to preserve world peace and to cope with climate change, pandemics and much more. Can my noble friend the Minister reassure us that the United Kingdom will take the lead in this respect?
I could not participate in yesterday’s Second Reading of the appalling borders Bill, and I will not rehearse the powerful arguments against the Bill, but I am deeply concerned about the hostile narrative that it fosters. So many refugees and asylum seekers feel unworthy and they continue to suffer stigma in this country, notwithstanding the work of organisations and networks such as City of Sanctuary, which in turn gave birth to Universities of Sanctuary. I am very proud that Somerville College and Mansfield College are the first university colleges of sanctuary, creating an environment of support and welcome and working with students, academics and the local community. We award sanctuary scholarships to refugees such as Asif, who travelled alone to Britain from Afghanistan aged just 14 in order to avoid being conscripted by the Taliban. He is now excelling in his studies and will make a great contribution to society. Sadly, higher education is something that only 3% of refugees in this country experience—another of the immeasurable challenges they face.
I should briefly mention the work of CARA, the Council for At-Risk Academics, which provides a lifeline to academics at risk and is supported by many universities, including Oxford. I pay tribute to charities such as Asylum Welcome, which is doing a superb job in welcoming Afghan refugees to Oxfordshire and providing invaluable, practical help and support, as it does to all refugees and asylum seekers in the county. It enables the teaching of English, provides youth services and domestic abuse support, helps people into employment and so much more.
I have an extraordinary young Afghan refugee living with me, Freshta Karim, a children’s rights activist who founded a charity, Charmaghz, which provided mobile libraries to enable young people in Afghanistan to have a better education. In November, she addressed the UN Security Council. I asked her what she, as a refugee, most wanted. Her response was: “peace”. No displaced person wants to leave their home and their family. They have to do so because their country is riven with conflict or ravaged by the impact of climate change. She thought that the UN should not just be a provider of aid in Afghanistan, important though that is. It should bring the different stakeholders together, as we did in Northern Ireland.
We should listen to the millions of people such as Freshta who are exhausted by conflict and war and desperate for peace and stability, who have so much to give and want to give back to the communities in which they find sanctuary, and who ultimately want to bring about change in their own country.
“The international community is failing to prevent violence, persecution and human rights violations, which continue to drive people from their homes … It is the communities and countries with the fewest resources that continue to shoulder the greatest burden in … caring for the forcibly displaced”.
To address these issues, he called on the international community to
“redouble its efforts to make peace”,
while ensuring that
“resources are available to displaced communities and their hosts.”
In response to that situation, in 2018 the Government signed up to an international agreement on support for refugees and reforming the global humanitarian situation: the Global Compact on Refugees. It provided the basis for a co-ordinated international response to improve support for refugees and share the responsibility for hosting them more fairly among wealthy and poorer countries. However, this agreement is not legally binding and internally displaced persons are not represented in it.
I simply ask the Minister: what progress has been made on this global compact in the last three years? Has the international response become more effective and co-ordinated than it was? Finally, in what way have our drastic cuts in foreign aid affected this programme and our support for that global compact?