FCO's Human Rights Work 2010-11

We welcome the considerable effort which has gone into the preparation of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s 2011 Human Rights and Democracy Report, which is seen as authoritative and comprehensive. Our only substantial criticism of the report itself is the absence of any systematic evaluation of the Department’s human rights policies and initiatives, and we recommend that the FCO experiment in the next report with introducing accountability measures for some of its human rights programmes, for instance by setting benchmarks, targets and indicators.

Countries of concern

The FCO has extended the list of ‘countries of concern’, where human rights failings are serious and to which the FCO wants to draw particular attention. While we believe that the designation of ‘countries of concern’ serves a useful purpose in stating in a very public fashion that the UK believes that human rights in those countries fall well short of what is deemed acceptable internationally, the criteria for designation remain vague, and the practice can appear inconsistent and restrictive. We recommend that decisions on designation should be based purely on assessments of human rights standards and should not be coloured by external factors, such as strategic considerations or the UK’s ability to influence developments. Given the Bahraini authorities’ brutal repression of demonstrators in February and March 2011, we believe that Bahrain should have been designated as a country of concern in the FCO’s 2011 report on human rights and democracy.

It is inevitable that the UK will have strategic, commercial or security-related interests which have the potential to conflict with its human rights values. In our view, it would be in the Government’s interest for it to be more transparent in acknowledging that there will be contradictions in pursuing these interests while promoting human rights values. The Government’s role should be publicly to set out and explain its judgments on how far to balance the two in particular cases, having taken into account the need to adapt policy according to local circumstances and developments.

Removal and deportation

The UK is committed, as a state party to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, not to return a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that they would be placed at risk of torture on their return. Yet there are persistent allegations that asylum-seekers who have been returned to Sri Lanka by the UK have suffered torture and ill-treatment. When we tried to explore the issue, the Government was not particularly forthcoming about its efforts—in general and in specific cases—to assess the level of risk to the safety of those who are removed from the UK. We found this unsatisfactory. We encourage the FCO to be energetic in evaluating reports by non-governmental organisations and media sources of torture of deportees from the UK. The Government should also clarify the division between the roles of the FCO and of the UK Border Agency’s Country of Origin Information Service in gathering the intelligence needed to make accurate assessments of risk.

Support for human rights overseas has become an established element in statements of UK foreign policy under successive governments. We welcome the Government’s stated commitment to the promotion of human rights overseas as one of its central foreign policy objectives, and we commend the work that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)

does to further this aim. We recommend that the Government demonstrates this commitment in its foreign policy decisions.

We welcome the FCO’s continued production of an annual human rights report. We also welcome the Foreign Secretary’s decision to establish an Advisory Group on Human Rights.

The events of the ‘Arab Spring’ should stand as a reminder to the FCO that failing to take a stronger and more consistent stance against human rights violations by overseas regimes can carry risks for the UK. Any suggestion that the FCO downplays criticism of human rights abuses in countries with which the UK has close political and commercial links is damaging to the UK’s reputation and undermines the department’s overall work in promoting human rights overseas. We report concerns on this front with respect to UK policy towards Saudi Arabia, Syria and Bahrain in particular. We consider that the FCO should have included Bahrain as one of its “countries of concern” in its 2010 human rights report, and we recommend that the FCO takes a more robust and significantly more consistent position on human rights violations throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

We are not as confident as the FCO that there is little conflict between its simultaneous pursuit of both UK commercial interests and improved human rights standards overseas, and that the two objectives can be complementary.

The events of the ‘Arab Spring’ have revealed serious shortcomings in the system of UK arms export controls as regards the possible use of British-supplied equipment for internal repression. The Government has announced a review of policy and practice with respect to such equipment, the results of which had not been made public when we approved this Report on 13 July 2011. We look forward to the Government sharing the results of its review with Parliament in a timely and proper fashion.

We recommend that the FCO give higher priority to working to internationalise standards for human rights in business behaviour. This is essential if the UK’s efforts to promote human rights internationally are not to be undercut by the behaviour of other countries and their companies.

We draw attention to the need for the FCO to work more closely with other departments and agencies to ensure that its human rights agenda is shared across Government. We highlight the FCO’s relationships with the Department for International Development (DFID), the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), and UK Trade and Investment (UKTI); and policy areas including trade policy, women in conflict situations, and children’s rights.