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[VISCOUNT BUCKMASTER.]
[LORDS]
sufferings endured by those people, particularly from Uganda, who know that their lives may be in danger if they return.
Thirdly, I would ask the Minister whether it is not possible for the waiting time for such people to be reduced? There are some refugees-I have met several as I am in contact with a great many in this country- who are waiting for four whole years. What a terrible situation! They are unable to work, and all the time this terrible Sword of Damocles, represented by their terror of returning to their own countries, is suspended above their heads. Finally, I should like the Minister to give due consideration to the removal of the refugees from the closed camps in Hong Kong (about which another speaker will tell your Lordships), and particu- larly to reunite families bearing in mind that there are now 434 refugees in the open and closed camps in Hong Kong who have relations in Great Britain.
I turn in conclusion to the triumphant. How, one may ask, can there be any triumph in a situation so fraught with misery and despair? And yet I know of so many refugees I have seen who have triumphed. When I think of these triumphs I am reminded of the saxifrage plant. That tiny, slender, fragile plant bursting its way up through the rocky ground in just the same way so many refugees triumph. Forging their way ahead, bursting through those rocky barriers of hostility and indifference; forever going on ahead, forging upwards, outwards and onwards. And this is wonderful to behold.
There are many who have triumphed. I can give your Lordships just two brief examples. There was a cripple, a refugee from Uganda, who was living in penury in Kenya. He came to Britain and was looked after by the Commission and by the Ockenden Venture. In a short time he has settled down here, passing his exams, and doing very well. Another Ugandan came, again from Kenya, and he bore on his body all the scars of persecution. He had that dazed, stunned expression of those who have suffered too much fear. In a short while he had once more adjusted himself, and although he was no academic, he has passed two A-levels at C standard. Is that not triumph, my Lords?
Although there is triumph in abundance, there is also continuing tragedy in abundance in the third world. When I look upon those great lava flows of misery slowly engulfing so many areas, the apparently unstoppable stream of refugees pouring into Sudan from Ethiopia, the continuing terror of torture camps, the gallows and the gun, that great myriad of unfed mouths, those hoards of scantily clad bodies, I feel myself overwhelmed by a great wave of helplessness and despair.
It is on those occasions that I look at the last judgment in St. Matthew's Gospel, which not only brings me back to the cornerstone of my speech, but it contains the most glorious, the supreme justification for work among refugees. I quote from St. Matthew Chapter 25, Verse 35:
"For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger and ye took me in: Naked and ye
clothed me".
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And a little further on:
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"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me".
My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.11 p.m.
Lord McNair: My Lords, I applaud the initiative of the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, in calling our attention today to the situation of the refugees in the third world. I congratulate him on his patience and eventual luck in the ballot, and also upon his excellent speech. I should also like to utter a heartfelt “Hear, hear!" to the tributes which he paid to the UNHCR and the British Refugee Council.
I do not intend to speak about any special group of refugees. I am sure I can rely on others to focus attention on the particular and localised problems of which they have special knowledge. I want to try to talk about the problem as a whole, and more about prevention than cure. Without, I hope, stepping out of order, I shall not interpret the terms of the Motion in too narrow a sense. In strict legality you cannot be a refugee until you have crossed a national frontier, but if someone is squatting in an emergency feeding centre in the Horn of Africa with their baby dying in their lap I do not suppose they bother too much about which side of the border they are on, if, indeed, they know. For the purposes of this debate I would rather take the word "refugees" to cover all people who have been grossly deprived of some of the more basic human rights, whether or not they are still in their country of origin, in other words, to include potential refugees.
This definitional problem may serve to remind us that the topic we are considering is only a part of a much bigger and even more tragic totality. If one can imagine a huge canvas by a Goya or a Breughel depicting the entire spectrum of man's beastliness 1985-style, it is possible that the refugees of the world would be just a detail in the corner. Indeed, in some ways and in some areas they may, for all their pitiable plight, be among the relatively lucky ones. There can be few resettled refugees who are not haunted by the memory of relatives and friends they left behind, the ones who did not get away: those, for example, who died in their attempt to escape from persecution, starvation or both, or those who are still languishing, prisoners of conscience, in the torture-houses which have erupted all over the face of this planet like symptoms of the plague.
In truth, your refugee may not be, in Wordsworth's phrase, the "most unhappy man of men” but it is his situation that we are considering here today. Since it is better to help those we can help than to weep for those we cannot, I welcome this chance to bring to the attention of the House the most remarkable piece of work which I have ever read on this subject. It is described as A Study on Human Rights and Massive Exoduses. It was addressed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. It was written in 1981 by His Highness Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan after he had ceased to be the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The three classical solutions to refugee problems, as the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, reminded us, used to be voluntary repatriation, local integration in
Refugees:
[ 27 FEBRUARY 1985]
the country of first asylum or resettlement in third countries. But these solutions are simply not adequate for the massive exoduses of recent years. So, to quote from paragraph 5 of the report:
"Many governments have reached the conclusion that serious attention must be paid to analysing the forces which get people on the move, with a view particularly to considering whether means can be found to avert new large-scale refugee situations”. That, alas, was written four years ago, before Ethiopia.
There follows a comparison of the two schools of international law: the progressive school, which sees individuals rather than states as the subjects of international law; and the classic school, beloved of governments, which reverses the order and enshrines the sovereign prerogatives of the nation state. Prince Sadruddin is too much of a diplomat and a United Nations man to say it, but if one likes clear-cut distinctions between "goodies" and "baddies" then in refugee situations the baddy is almost bound to be a government.
I should perhaps remind your Lordships that this report, which I am trying to summarise in a few minutes, was A Study on Human Rights and Massive Exoduses. It follows that more emphasis is laid on the political than on the economic causes of exodus, though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, is by no means silent about the economic factors. I am afraid, though, that a quick perusal of that declaration serves only to show what a wildly Utopian document it was and how far we are from its realisation. A few almost random quotations will illustrate this point. I quote:
"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person". "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment".
"All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrim- ination to equal protection of the law".
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”. "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion...".
"Everyone has the right to expression...".
freedom of opinion and
Did not every single one of those assertions of our rights immediately remind your Lordships of frequent examples of their gross denial? What of Article 21, which I think is worth quoting in full:
"(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures".
What proportion of the world's population could understand, let alone have any hope of ever enjoying, the provisions of that article? In case its recital might make us feel too smug in this country, let me also quote the first two sections of Article 23:
"(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work”.
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The denial, wilful or unavoidable, of some or all of these human rights, as well as of others, such as the right to
"food, clothing, housing and medical care",
forms a large proportion of what the report calls the "push factors". These are the forces which get people on the move, but there are of course others. War, either civil or international; the imposition by force of exotic ideologies on uneducated people to whose traditions they are repugnant; the inheritance by emerging ex-colonial countries of ethnically meaning- less
frontiers; premature and uncontrolled urbanisation; and ill-advised agrarian policies which oblige subsistence farmers to turn to cash crops for export. Incidentally, the term "subsistence farming" is often used in a derogatory sense, but, surely, subsistence is a great deal better than starvation.
These are among the "push factors". What are the "pull factors" which beckon from abroad and lure people into attempts to emigrate which, at least occasionally, they may come to regret? The most obvious, perhaps, is that cliché, the shrinking world. Travel and communications have accelerated almost exponentially. Before the advent of the transistor radio and of television most people in the world's poorest countries simply did not know that there were other places where life was easier. Now they do know. They know also that in the democratic countries of the developed north we pay something more than lip service to human rights; and this is another magnet. They may hear in our broadcasts criticisms of their governments which may sadly mislead them into believing that our doors are always open.
These are some of the “pull factors”, but the most potent, I suspect, is aid itself. This may sound heartless. It is certainly not an argument against giving aid. What I am suggesting is that development aid given in time in the country of origin could often forestall and avert these mass migrations to neighbouring countries where aid is known to be available or believed to be available.
In other words--and I have to leave out a lot of what I had prepared to say-do we not clearly need an early- warning system to predict these crises before they occur? In nearly every case they are predictable. Should the United Nations not set up a radar chain of multi-disciplinary observers, as it were, strategically placed throughout the third world? Might it not be appropriate for the Secretary-General to appoint a special representative for humanitarian questions, among whose duties would be the establishment and supervision of this early-warning system? These are among the recommendations which conclude the Sadruddin Report. I have no time to describe them to your Lordships in detail. I think I had better leave it at that, with apologies for having miscalculated the duration of my speech.
3.22 p.m.
Viscount Brentford: My Lords, I rise to my feet with a lot of fear and trepidation, first, because it is the first time that I have risen to speak in your Lordships' House but also because of the enormous size of the subject which we are discussing-and the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, in opening this debate, put the figure at 14 million, which is a very large