My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group. I particularly want to mention the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Dubs, and spoken to powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, about the importance of reunion of families.
As some noble Lords will know, I have recently been involved in the evacuation of women judges from Afghanistan. The first flight that I was involved in getting the women out on had 30 women on it. Unfortunately, I was woken at 5 am by a call from our point man at Mazar-i-Sharif airport, who said that
the husband of one of the women judges had an out-of-date passport. It was not long out of date, but it was out of date, so he would not be allowed on the plane. I spoke to the woman judge, who I had got to know through her desperate communications with me. She was weeping, and I could hear her children weeping. I told her to get on the plane with her children and that I would do everything I in my power to get her husband to join her.
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She said, “Can you guarantee it?” I said, “That I can’t do, but I promise you I will do everything I can to have him join you”. I did not have the confidence in my heart that I would be able to keep the promise of reuniting her husband with her and her children. I am afraid that the whole family had to be stepped down from the flight, leaving me with seats which had involved a lot of money having to be gathered together for this evacuation, because she could not go on the flight. My heart was heavy, because it was a reflection on what I felt and the confidence that I did not have in our system. I have told that story because reunion of families should be at the forefront of our minds.
My name is on Amendment 51. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, has spoken so powerfully about the importance of keeping to our commitment and duty to act when a genocide is in progress and not wait until it is over, and our duty to be of assistance to those who might flee from such persecution. As he has described, a very important protection is in here, in answering the question, as posed, “Who decides whether a genocide is in progress?” This would come before a senior court here, so it would not be a requirement of politicians to make that decision as to whether there was a genocide in progress. However, we must be prepared to support and help those who are fleeing the kind of persecution that is currently taking place in Xinjiang province. There is no need for anxiety that the whole province will end up on our shores; it is very rare that people can flee and make the journey at all. Therefore, I support Amendment 51, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Alton.
I want to speak powerfully about the importance of there being rapid responses. The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, has just mentioned how we can invent all sorts of processes but there must be an opportunity to say, “Take people now” if they are in mortal danger. It is what people are feeling about the situation in Ukraine. If you want to be doing these testing and security checks, bring people here and then do the checking. If someone is really a Soviet spy or former KGB agent, make your decision and deport them—but you have to act quickly to save lives.
There is a particular issue here for journalists. Our own Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has run a wonderful project, along with many other nations, on media freedom. Britain was there at the start of this project and now there are 50 countries around the world involved in it. One of the reports by the high-level legal panel that was created under that project contained a commitment made by all those countries to create emergency visas for journalists and other human rights people at the front line whose lives are in mortal danger—as was the case for my women judges. These were people who were dealing with human
rights issues, protecting women, protecting people from the Taliban and jailing the Taliban. Not being able to put your hand on emergency visas is a tragedy and puts people’s lives at risk. It should be possible for there to be emergency visas. That is what my Amendment 50, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is about: creating emergency rapid responses for people who are at risk.
I remember Anna Politkovskaya, a great Russian journalist, who came to Britain to receive an award, that I was asked to give to her, for PEN International—a brave journalist who had gone to Chechnya and covered some of the ghastly things that Putin was doing there. She wrote a book, Putin’s Russia, that really put her in his sights. She came to receive this prize, and I remember sitting with her that night; we were all saying to her: “Stay. Do not go back. Your life is in danger”. She said, “I know it is, but my son is 16 and I have to go back to make sure that he could get out with me”. She went back, and I opened my newspaper two weeks later, and there was the blood on her staircase. She had been shot dead.
What was needed was emergency visas. She could have gone to our embassy, secured a visa for her son and got out within days. Instead, weeks passed and she ended up dead. We must have ways of responding to these situations rapidly. My Amendment 50 allows that kind of visa to exist for those facing imminent risk of death, and it should apply to people who, perhaps for reasons of religion, or reasons to do with their personal characteristics, might be in the same mortal danger. I hope that the House will support this amendment too.