Select Committee on International Development Uncorrected Written Evidence


Memorandum submitted by The Corner House

  1.  The Corner House is a not-for-profit research and advocacy group, focusing on human rights, environment and development. It aims to support the growth of a democratic, equitable and non-discriminatory civil society in which communities have control over the resources and decisions that affect their lives and means of livelihood, as well as the power to define themselves rather than to be defined only by others.

  2.  Since the early 1980s, Corner House staff have been monitoring the human rights, environmental and social impacts of UK overseas aid policies and programme. Most recently, in 2002, The Corner House jointly organised a public seminar with the Ilisu Dam Campaign's Refugee Project and Peace in Kurdistan on "How UK Investment Creates Asylum Seekers and Refugees".[45]The seminar specifically explored the links between forced migration and UK overseas investment policies, including the export of weapons and support for destructive dams, oil and gas pipelines, and mines. The papers from the seminar are available at www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/refinves.pdf.

  3.  The Corner House welcomes the International Development Committee's Inquiry into Migration. This submission explores the links between migration and both private and public sector financial flows and investment in developing countries. Specifically, it seeks to address Question 5 of the Committee's Terms of Reference, namely: Can aid prevent violent conflicts and reduce the number of international asylum seekers?

FORCED VERSUS VOLUNTARY MIGRATION

  4.  The Corner House welcomes the positive contribution made by immigrants to the culture and economy of the UK and other societies and views migration both as a force for enriching societies and as an expression of a fundamental human right to freedom of movement. It regrets that the positive contribution made by immigrants to the culture and economy of the UK and other societies is generally overlooked in the debate on migration and asylum seeking. It also opposes the discriminatory approach of the UK authorities towards economic migrants, with richer individuals receiving privileged treatment that is denied poorer migrants.[46]

  5.  Whilst welcoming voluntary migration, however, The Corner House is resolutely opposed to forced migration and consequently to forms of economic and social development that result in involuntary resettlement or that leave people with no option but to move in order to escape political oppression or economic deprivation. It believes that the current scope of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention should be broadened to grant refugee status to those who have been forcibly evicted from their homes or economically displaced by current development policies.

FORCED MIGRATION AND UK AID AND FOREIGN INVESTMENT

  6.  The causes of forced migration are many and varied. In some cases, they arise from the direct impacts of a project on the environment or the local economy; in others, they are more diffuse, having their roots in wider local, regional and even international power imbalances. Reasearch by The Corner House has identified five areas in which development projects and programmes supported by the UK, either through public money or through private sector investment, has contributed to the direct or proximate causes of forced migration:

    —  Support for repressive regimes. Conflict and political repression are widely acknowledged as major causes of asylum seeking and enforced migration. It is thus of particular concern that the major clients for many of the arms deals backed by the UK government through the UK Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) have been regimes that are recognised to be repressive. In the last two decades, for example, the ECGD has backed arms sales to Iraq, Indonesia (which at the time was deploying death squads in East Timor), Saudi Arabia and Turkey—all countries with human rights records that have been subject to international criticism and, in the case of Turkey, condemnation by the European Court of Human Rights. Not only do the arms sales send a message of political approval of the recipient government—often extending the life of repressive regimes—but there is well-documented evidence of arms backed by the ECGD being directly used to suppress dissent. In the case of Indonesia, for example, hawk "trainer" jets sold to the Suharto regime were used to bomb villagers in East Timor where the Indonesian armed forces were engaged in a brutal war to crush popular resistance to Indonesian rule.

    —  Collusion by UK companies with oppressive security forces. Where UK investments or exports are destined for areas of existing conflict, they may perpetuate or exacerbate violence if the company's "licence to operate" is dependent on collusion with local paramilitaries or government security forces. A case in point is the BP-led Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline project, which the UK government has recently supported through two loans from the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Security for the Turkish section of the pipeline will be the responsibility of the Gendarmerie, a paramilitary force whose operations have been repeatedly condemned by the European Court for Human Rights. The possibility of future security operations along the pipeline resulting in human rights abuses and consequent asylum cases is thus high.

    —  The history of BP's Ocensa pipeline in Colombia illustrates the dangers. BP currently pays the government a "war tax" of US$1 per barrel to help finance army and police protection of its oil facilities which are routinely subject to attacks by guerrillas opposed to oil extraction. The response of the Colombian security services to such guerrilla attacks has been brutal, with villagers subject to major human rights abuses by the army in its attempts to secure the pipeline. In 1995, when residents of the village of El Moro set up a roadblock to demand compensation for damages caused by BP's lorries, soldiers from the 16 Brigade, an army unit specifically assigned to protect the pipeline, killed two of the protest leaders and threatened others. Government human rights lawyers who investigated the killings reported that the army were "out of control". The Corner House is aware of at least one case of asylum arising from human rights abuses associated with BP's operations in Colombia.

    —  Exacerbating politically-manipulated ethnic tensions. Recent massacres of ethnic groups in Rwanda and elsewhere have led many commentators to blame a range of current conflicts—particularly in the South—on "ancient tribal hatreds". However, as Jane Nelson of International Alert argues, close analysis of such conflicts reveals that "it is often not ethnic differences per se that have created conflict but the way in which political leaders and other actors have exploited these differences and incited intolerance in order to consolidate their own positions of power or access to resources."[47] Growing inequalities between ethnic groups, often the result of such manipulation, adds fuel to the inevitable sense of grievance, providing further scope for unscrupulous interests to ferment "ethnic" violence as part of a wider political strategy for gaining, or shoring up, political power. Wittingly or unwittingly, aid and investment flows may actively encourage such politically-manipulated "ethnic" violence by backing projects which disadvantage one ethnic group over another, for example through discriminatory labour-hiring practices or through permitting one group to obtain control over key livelihood resources. In the 1980s, for example, Britain's ECGD and the then Overseas Development Administration (ODA) backed a series of dams that were built on Sri Lanka's Mahaweli River. Officials within the Mahaweli Authority have admitted that, in league with militant Buddhist priests, they used the subsequent resettlement programme to drive a wedge between minority communities of Tamil-speaking Hindus and Muslims by settling poverty-stricken households from the Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority within and around minority communities.[48] As a result, violence erupted in a number of resettlement villagers, with both Tamils and Sinhalese villagers being massacred. Such inter-community strife has been a major cause of refugees seeking asylum in the UK.

    —  Creating or exacerbating environmental degradation. The adverse impact of many UK-backed projects on the environment are well-documented. Such impacts go beyond the immediate destruction caused by pollution or forest destruction: of equal importance are the wider ramifications of infrastructure investments on poorer peoples' access to and control over the environments that they rely on for their livelihoods. Dams in particular—many of them backed by the UK through both bilateral aid and through the World Bank and other multilateral development banks—have proved a major cause of environmental degradation, triggering a downward cycle of dispossession, poverty and immiseration as people are forced to move in search of new livelihoods. In India alone, it has been estimated that between 20-50 million people have been displaced by dams, many of them backed by the UK or built with UK involvement.

    —  The number of such "environmental refugees" is predicted to increase considerably as a result of global warming, with as many as 100 million people forced to move by the middle of this century as a result of sea level rise, drought and less favourable weather conditions. Despite such predictions, the UK does not require the projects and programmes it supports through public money—for example, through the Department for International Development (DfID), the World Bank or the ECGD—to be assessed for their full climate-change impacts. In the case of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, for example, the Environmental Impact Assessment for the project examined the climate impacts of greenhouse gas emissions that would result from the day-to-day operations of the pipeline. No assessment was made, however, of the long-term climatic impacts of burning the oil transported by the pipeline or of the likely social and environmental impacts of any resulting climate change. Yet it has been calculated that the oil exported by BTC will add 160 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere over the 40-year life-span of the project.

    —  The failure to require any assessment of the climate impacts of infrastructure and other projects backed by UK public money is of particular concern given the ECGD's stated commitment to expanding its support for the oil and gas sector, describing the prospects for major future business as "promising".[49]The migration-generating implications of such projects are potentially considerable.

    —  Increasing poverty. Inequality is a major root cause of conflict, which in turn is a major cause of forced migration. Although poverty alleviation is a central focus of UK development aid, the structural adjustment programmes imposed on many developing countries by the International Monetary Fund (in which the UK is a shareholder) have proved extremely onerous for poorer people, cutting public funding for health and other social programmes. Trade policies promoted through the World Trade Organisation, particularly in the field of agricultural trade liberalisation, have also greatly exacerbated poverty in many developing countries.

FORCED MIGRATION AND INSTITUTIONAL FAILURES IN AID FINANCING

  7.  Whilst both aid and investment flows from the North can potentially play a positive role in reducing such forced migration—notably through promoting secure, sustainable livelihoods—the record suggests that their past and current influence is frequently less benign. Not only are UK public and private overseas financial flows heavily implicated in the generation and perpetuation of forced migration in many parts of the world, but they are also frequently sanctioned without adequate—or often any—assessment of their potential to generate such dislocation. For example, the case of official development assistance:

    —  Half of DfID's annual aid budget is disbursed through Multilateral Financial Institutions (such as the World Bank) which lack any requirement to assess the programmes and projects they fund for their human rights impacts, let alone to ensure compliance with international human rights obligations;

    —  Whilst individual projects funded by Britain through the World Bank are required to comply with the Bank's safeguard policies, including policies on involuntary resettlement, internal World Bank reports have repeatedly revealed a failure by Bank staff to apply the policies;

    —  None of the structural adjustment lending programmes financed by the Bank are subject to the Bank's safeguard policies; and sectoral loans are scrutinised only for environmental and social impacts. Approximately one third to one half of the Bank's lending—some £7-10 billion a year—is thus disbursed without adequate assessment of its potential environmental, social or human rights impacts.

  8.  The Corner House believes that the failure to address the role that UK overseas financial flows, including aid, plays in causing forced migration subjects would-be immigrants to a double injustice. First they are forced to move from their homes; then they are refused refugee status and subjected to denigration as "economic migrants", "welfare scroungers" and the like.

  9.  The Corner House believes that there is an urgent need to introduce new screening procedures for UK aid and foreign investments to minimise the risk that they will cause forced migration. In the case of official development aid:

    —  Within the Multilateral Development Banks, current safeguard policies (particularly on forced resettlement and environmental assessment) should be extended to all programmes that are funded, rather applied solely to project funding;

    —  The UK government should press for urgent institutional reform at the World Bank to ensure that safeguard policies are observed by Bank staff;

    —  New procedures should be adopted to ensure that the projects and programmes supported by UK development aid, including aid disbursed through Multilateral Financial Institutions, meets international human rights obligations;

    —  Development projects or programmes supported with UK public funds should be assessed for their conflict-generating potential and their funding should be conditional on appropriate measures being in place to minimise conflict and prevent forced migration.

November 2003




45   The Refugee Project arose from the work of the Ilisu Dam Campaign, in which The Corner House was a leading member, in opposing any UK government decision to grant export credits to Balfour Beatty for the Ilisu Dam in the Kurdish region of South Eastern Turkey. The dam would have forcibily evicted 78,000 people, mainly ethnic Kurds, from their lands. The issue was the subject of several inquiries by the International Development Committee. Back

46   The Corner House notes that the largest group of migrants worldwide-some 25 million in the mid-1990s-consists of the employees of multinational companies (mostly middle and upper management) who move from one country to another in search of new business opportunities. Few impediments are put in their way; on the contrary, many companies now make a condition of the contracts they draw up with host governments that special bureaus should be established to facilitate their employees obtaining the necessary work permits and visas. In Britain, partners and children are invariably granted permission to join executives working from multinational companies: dependents wishing to join poorer migrants, however, are excluded. Back

47   Nelson, J, "The Business of Peace", International Alert, Council on Economic Priorities and The Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum, London, 2000, p.39. Back

48   Gunaratna 1998: 13; Scudder 1990, 1994. As Thayer Scudder of the California Institute of Technology notes: "Though contrary to project goals, which stipulated that ethnic and religiously distinct populations were not to be mixed and that minorities were to receive plots according to their proportionate representation within the national population, these actions were ignored by such donors at the United States Agency for International Development and the World Bank. Subsequently, massacres on both sides occurred, in some instances in the very communities where they had been predicted." Back

49   ECGD, Annual Report 2001-02, p.17, The ECGD also reports: "ECGD's oil and gas team is continuing to receive a significant level of enquiries as the demand for British expertise in the world's oil and gas sectors remains strong. Back


 
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