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Human Rights

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Patten, I feel like a minnow in treacherous legal waters, but I dare to plunge in. Human rights have come from international treaties and were not invented by this Government, as is sometimes implied, but the Government do deserve credit for incorporating them into legislation, and about time. My own generation—students of the 1960s—long expected this pursuit of human rights to come from a progressive Government, not a conservative one. Perhaps that was because my father was a Tory MP with rather different interests and I did not immediately identify the search for justice for victims of poverty, persecution, crime and avarice with conservatism. However, now that I have heard the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, and had a chance to read David Cameron’s article in the current issue of Christian Aid News, and despite what the noble Lord, Lord Lester, said pertinently about the attitude to terrorism in the Conservative Party, or parts of it, I realise that I was wrong. It is, and it always hasbeen, a Conservative objective. It is just that they never boasted about it. Perhaps they felt it was unobtainable. I welcome the fact that all political parties are laying claim to this great inheritance, and I do not except the Cross Benches either; but we are still far from honouring the commitments that we have made. Today I should like to get over one simple point—that human rights are not contained within frontiers; they are indivisible, and international development has to go hand-in-hand with human rights protection in this country. Perhaps I may quote the case of an asylum seeker who has been in touch with me recently, whom I shall call Maria. She comes from northern Mozambique. She is the child of a Christian Portuguese father and an Indian Muslim mother, so she can be called a world citizen with no claim to anywhere. During Mozambique's violent civil war, of which I had some experience myself, she lost contact with both her parents and any relevant documents were lost. She became a street child, homeless, sheltering with others along railway lines and even wandering across frontiers until a Portuguese family helped her to obtain a forged Portuguese passport. Maria entered the UK in 1992 and for five years she managed to start a new life. She found work cleaning and cooking. She took English classes and was soon able to pay tax and national insurance. It seemed like a success story until her passport—her fake passport—was stolen. Although she reported it, she had thereby lost her only form of identification. At this point her work came to an end. There were no taxes paid. Her claim for asylum was turned down in 2005 and her allowance from NASS was stopped. She became destitute and reliant on the charity of churches. It seems that she still does not belong anywhere. Two years later, Maria remains stateless, rejected by the Home Office and the Mozambique embassy. She says: "““I’m left begging for everything every day ... I am extremely exhausted, depressed and fearful ... I have no money for daily living … I wander aimlessly in the streets … (Yet) I sustained myself by working hard … educating myself and paying my taxes in this country and lived peacefully. That’s not what criminals normally do””." She is being punished, she says, although she is a war victim. She is no ““sponger”” or danger to society. How many men and women like Maria are there out there roaming the streets because the IND cannot look at individual cases and make initial decisions outside the tick boxes? How much more evidence is needed that in the search for neat solutions under the new asylum model and the host of regulations, we are letting down people of real quality? Here is someone who is the antithesis of the asylum seeker of popular imagination who is taking bread from our own mouths—I warm to what the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said about legal aid, of which I am sure the Minister will take note—someone who has not only suffered human rights abuses of many kinds but whom our society also needs and should cherish. Instead, we are condemning this person to the life of the street children that she thought she had left behind. It is difficult to solve human rights problems far from home. This morning, by invitation of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, I listened to appalling stories about the treatment of Chechen women at the hands of the Russian state. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford referred to such tyranny. When will we in Europe stand up to Russia, to hold up a mirror of what it is doing to persecute women who try only to stand up for themselves and explain the brutality they have suffered? On Monday, with the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, and others, I heard some distressing tales of women who have suffered human rights abuse in Herat in western Afghanistan. These were mainly cases of domestic violence against women who had been forced into marriage or servitude of various forms, and they had often been attacked, tortured and even set on fire. Some had opted for self-immolation. The remarkable woman who was trying to help them through a very small charity fully accepted that her efforts, although commendable in the context of her educated background, were feeble beside the trend of custom and tradition in Afghanistan. These stories can be told in our own communities, as we have heard, but when human rights workers come from afar to share their predicament we have obligations towards them. Their biggest task at home is to change the attitudes of politicians and people in authority who condone these practices in their own country. We have an obligation to help them, and, as countries contributing to their reconstruction, we may be able to help. While human rights are indivisible and should be upheld anywhere, it is plainly impossible for all these problems to be solved by international development. It takes time for education and understanding to work themselves through in those countries to resolve the problems which the law by itself cannot solve. On the other hand, if women such as Maria, along with thousands of families from Africa and Asia who now live in this country, have been able to escape from lives of poverty, civil war and human rights abuse, and are on our doorstep, can we not see them as equally deserving of international development in this country? Is not the filter of immigration control also a means of sustaining life and of celebrating survival? This week we are celebrating 50 years of the European Union. As part of that we can rejoice at the standards we have set for ourselves in Europe, as expressed through the various conventions. I am not sure that I want to see much more written down or any more Bills of Rights. I would prefer to see a Europe which stops navel-gazing and constitution-seeking and looks outwards to the rest of the world. We have a great deal more to offer today than we had in 1957; and we could be more generous still. In many ways we have become a magnet. That too brings obligations. Many of our citizens are alarmed by the prospects of migration. Yet we in Europe, with our ageing population and job shortages in certain sectors, need to attract more people to work here. Europe's population is falling rapidly. As a proportion of the world’s total, it was 12 per cent in 1945; it is down to 8 per cent today; and it is projected to fall to 4.5 per cent in 2050. Meanwhile, the pressure of refugees and migrants is greater than ever. This is surely not a threat but an opportunity, as I know the Government sometimes tell us, yet instead through some of our inward-looking policies we are in danger of condemning the persecuted to more misery, the poor to more penury and the homeless to a life on the streets.