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Africa: Governance and Law

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Sandwich is to be congratulated on obtaining this debate at a time when it is much needed. As news floods in of continued financial crisis and of sharper economic retreat worldwide, it is all too easy to allow it to drown out the needs of Africa and our own responsibility in helping to meet them—all too easy, but, I would argue, all too wrong. Short-sighted, too, in terms of our own medium and long-term prosperity and security, not to speak of the moral repugnance of turning our backs on a major part of that bottom billion of the world’s population who live in Africa. Nor do self-serving arguments about coming back to Africa’s problems once we have sorted out our own economic and financial difficulties make much sense. Africa will not sit patiently by as we do that—urgent challenges will go unmet, individual country situations will slide out of control, and as we have seen in the case of piracy off the horn of Africa, the continent has the capacity to nip our ankles quite painfully and damagingly if we neglect its problems. In addressing these problems today I suggest we need to avoid two traps. The first of these is to see the whole continent through the prism of Zimbabwe. It is inevitable that we in this country should, for historical reasons, focus strongly on developments in that unhappy country. It is right for the Government to pursue a "wait and see" policy for everything except humanitarian aid, while events in Zimbabwe demonstrate whether the coalition Government represent real change, and a move away from the tyranny of Mugabe, or just tragically more of the same. But we should not regard Zimbabwe as some awful paradigm of Africa as a whole; it is not. There are plenty of African countries that have, with strong international support, made the transition, or are making the transition, from conflict and tyranny to stability and better governance. Look at Namibia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and look at two countries such as Botswana and South Africa, which have achieved stability by their own largely unaided efforts. The second trap is to generalise too much about Africa, and to neglect the fact that the continent is composed of more than 50 independent countries, each with its own problems and each with its own need for its own solutions. This is a trap into which even the title of this debate risks leading us but which surely needs to be avoided. It is hard to avoid beginning any analysis of what needs to be done to strengthen governance and the rule of law in Africa by addressing the problem of conflict. Where conflicts are raging, or are barely suppressed, as they are in Darfur, the Congo and Somalia, among others, it is pretty academic to talk about good governance and the rule of law, just as it is pretty academic to hope that you can achieve economic development and prosperity in such countries. So we need to strengthen international efforts to prevent or resolve conflicts. The whole burden of that cannot simply be thrust on the UN, which is already reaching the limits of the number and scale of conflicts it can handle at one time. Therefore, Africa’s own peacekeeping and peacemaking capacities will need to be expanded and supported far more purposefully and far more effectively than has been achieved so far. That cannot just be done by Africans themselves, important though their contribution and that of their regional and sub-regional organisations will be; it will need finance, logistical back-up, training, specialist military and civilian capacities, and unswerving political support from outside. Clearly, there is a role here for the European Union, which has already done a good deal. Can the Minister give the House some idea of future EU plans? Can he say whether consideration is being given to joint efforts in this field with the United States now that the election of President Obama offers the prospect of a US Administration which will be more fully and more sympathetically engaged with the problems of Africa than has been the case in the past? In the same context, I join the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, by raising the context of our own contributions to conflict resolution and peacemaking, and I express the strongest dismay, occasioned by the report in the Financial Times of 2 March, that the Government have decided to cut back drastically their support for the civilian components of such operations—police, legal staff and so on. Can the Minister deny that the Government are even contemplating a step which is so completely contrary to their policy over recent years and which is so certain to undermine efforts to strengthen good governance and the rule of law? That brings me to one of the international community’s biggest failures in recent years: the failure to operationalise, to use an ugly but comprehensible word, the new notion of the standard of the "responsibility to protect" citizens of a state whose own Government are either unable or unwilling to perform that duty which every Government have to their citizens. Africa, alas, both before and since the agreement on the responsibility to protect at the UN summit in 2005, has been replete with examples of state failure. Indeed, it was an African case—that of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994—which triggered the international response that led to the adoption of the new standard. Effective promotion of good governance and the rule of law, not simply external military intervention, is at the heart of this concept. Some African Governments seem to fear that it is just a recipe for military intervention. However, it is important that international efforts to stop countries sliding towards, and then into, state failure should be continued. Last year’s review of the European Union’s security strategy identified the responsibility to protect as a priority for the EU to promote. Can the Minister say what the Government and the EU are doing to follow up that conclusion? What steps are being taken to demystify the whole concept of a responsibility to protect and to gain wider acceptance of a multi-faceted approach to its implementation, and perhaps wider buy-in and regional support for it from the neighbours of countries at risk? What can he tell us, indeed, about the work of the UN Secretary-General’s special adviser on the responsibility to protect? I spoke earlier of the need to strengthen African peacekeeping and peacemaking capacity, but even more important, surely, is the need to back up with deeds and resources, not just with warm words, the continent’s own mechanisms for promoting good governance and the rule of law, most particularly the African Union’s own African Peer Review Mechanism. What progress is the African Union making in persuading its member countries to accept application to it of the mechanism, and what is the track record of countries applying the remedies recommended in the reports made under the mechanism? What are we nationally, and the EU collectively, doing to reward countries that accept the mechanism and to help them to implement its recommendations? This must surely be an integral and sustained part of efforts to promote good governance and the rule of law in Africa. In conclusion, I should like to raise two particular African cases. In one, Somalia, over a period now of two decades, both before and after the collapse of the Siad Barre dictatorship, both good governance and the rule of law have been almost totally absent. The lesson to be drawn from the present threat from piracy in Somali waters, with which the international community is trying to cope, is surely that such efforts cannot stop at the water’s edge if they are to be genuinely effective. That neglect of a country such as Somalia is no solution, however painful the UN’s earlier experiences may have been. What is being done now to stabilise this situation and to begin to bring Somalia back from the depths of anarchy and conflict into which it has fallen? What are the Government doing to support Somaliland, the one part of that country in which good governance and the rule of law are not just pious wishes and distant aspirations? How do the Government see the situation of Somaliland evolving in both the near and the medium-term future? Finally, the second case is that of Sudan, which is in the headlines today because of the International Criminal Court’s decision to endorse its prosecutor’s view that President Bashir should be indicted for his responsibility for crimes committed in Darfur over many years. I think it is admirable that the court has resisted all the pressures put on it by the African Union, the Arab League and some members of the Security Council to allow politics to triumph over international law. It has thus shown its determination to be a genuine court of law and not a forum for diplomatic manoeuvre. If China or any other country now seeks to get the Security Council to suspend implementation of the indictment, I hope that the Minister can confirm that a very tough set of key performance indicators towards the people of Darfur will be required of the Government of Sudan before any such approach is even contemplated.