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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