Select Committee on International Development Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300 - 319)

THURSDAY 8 JUNE 2006

RT HON HILARY BENN MP, MR JIM DRUMMOND AND MR PHIL EVANS

  Q300  Chairman: The point that was made clear to us was that the complaint was not about DFID, which was continuing, it was the other donors and particularly the European Community.

  Hilary Benn: Indeed. Other donors will always have to answer for themselves. We do what we do, we do it by demonstration and we encourage others to do what we think is the right thing and other countries take different decisions.

  Q301  John Battle: Can we not say, "We will take back some of our multilateral if you do not come in with us on that project"?

  Hilary Benn: In relation to our contributions for the EC, we do not have that mechanism open to us. The other partner you were describing was the—?

  Q302  Mr Hunt: US Humanitarian Office.

  Hilary Benn: We do not make a contribution there. The broader problem, of course, is the appeal for the DRC has not been terribly well-funded, as we know. We are making a significant contribution. On Uganda and the camps, which was the second part of your question, at the moment the Government of Uganda, as I am sure you know, is wanting to move people out of the big camps that they have been in to move them into smaller satellite camps to get them closer to where home was, provide security, increase confidence and show people that it is possible to go back. I do not think there is an incentive there for the Government to go in and say, "No, no, it is all too dangerous. We are going to leave them where they are". There is an issue for the humanitarian community because it will be more difficult to make sure that provision and support is given to those people in a large number of satellite camps than is currently the case in the bigger number of camps where they are to be found, although the conditions, as I saw for myself in Padibe, were pretty difficult, not as bad as Somalia but pretty bad.

  Q303  John Barrett: Just slightly related to that is the issue of what is happening in one part of the country in relation to another part of the country. We have taken evidence before from you, Secretary of State, on what is happening in Sudan in the sequencing of a peace agreement in the south with the problems that there have been in Darfur and, again, we discussed that before. Have we learned any lessons from what happened in Sudan and Darfur that we take advantage of, what Jeremy Hunt has said there, in other parts of the world as to whether or not we think in one part of the country the peace agreement is signed, the conflict has ended, but elsewhere the real problems are people living in IDP camps? Is that something that we can look at to Darfur and say, "It is applicable, we have learned lessons and they can be applied elsewhere"?

  Hilary Benn: There has, of course, been, as we know, a very lively debate and you took part in the Westminster Hall debate upstairs and some people said that the balance was not right. I expressed the view in relation to Sudan that I thought the balance was right, but it does show just because you appear to have solved one problem, you have not dealt with another one. In relation to the DRC, since we seem to be focusing on it for absolutely understandable reasons, the east of the country is just really difficult. Now the same is true in Afghanistan: there are parts of the country where things are better and things are much more difficult in the south for reasons that have been fairly widely reported, and it does mean that you may have to act in a different way in different places at different times. I think it all comes back to trying to understand what is going on, what are people's motivation, why is this a problem, what can be done about it, who can we work with and how can we make sure that what we do does not make things worse. It all sounds rather trite and obvious, but it is obvious for a very good reason because they are sensible considerations to take into account in deciding what to do.

  Q304  Mr Singh: The Commission for Africa recommended that donors "use assessments of how to reduce the risk of violent conflict and improve human security in formulating their country and regional assistance strategies". I know DFID has a Strategic Conflict Assessment. How widely is this used, how committed are you to implementing that recommendation and, if it is used, what happens to the analysis which it produces within the Assessment?

  Hilary Benn: It is about asking, I think, precisely the questions that I alluded to a moment ago in answering Mr Barrett's question. When Mr Jim Drummond came to give evidence previously, I think you discussed the influence it had had when we used it in relation to what we are doing in Nepal. In relation to Yemen, it had an impact because it has led us to do some work on access to justice that might not otherwise have been the case. In Sri Lanka, the impact on the World Bank was that they realised that they needed to work more widely across the country, because otherwise focusing on one bit might lead people to think that they were not being even-handed in the work that they are doing, so we are committed to using it. In the case of the DRC, I think the Swedes and the States did it and we have drawn on the information contained in their analysis to inform the work that we are doing, so it does not mean that we have to do every one. If someone else is doing it, we can pinch their results.

  Q305  Mr Singh: I do not mean so much that situation. Within DFID, if nobody else is doing it, is it mandatory to do one?

  Mr Drummond: It is mandatory that people consider when they do a Country Assistance Plan whether there are conflict issues that this tool would be useful for, so we are not saying for every country we work in, "You have got to do it", but you have to pass a test which says, "Is it relevant to you?" and you can say when you submit the thing whether or not it is relevant.

  Q306  Mr Singh: Does that mean then we are not accepting the Commission for Africa's recommendation?

  Mr Drummond: We do not think it is sensible to do it in every single country for which we have an aid programme and so we have done it in about 20 countries so far. It is getting much more ingrained in the organisation.

  Q307  Mr Singh: Do you have plans for using it more extensively than you are at the present?

  Mr Drummond: We have made it mandatory that people ask themselves the right questions when they do a Country Assistance Plan and for more countries to use the tool than so far. I expect the number will increase, but I do not think it is sensible to say for absolutely everywhere in the world you have got to do a conflict assessment.

  Q308  Mr Singh: Is there any scope for a joint tool kit either of different government departments that are involved in the country or between donors to be used in common?

  Mr Drummond: Yes, we quite often do this exercise with other donors and I think, in the Sri Lanka case that the Secretary of State quoted—

  Q309  Mr Singh: There is not a common, uniform, joint tool kit used across our government departments, is there?

  Mr Drummond: Across Whitehall, the tool kit is becoming much more commonly used. Across other donors, I am not sure if we have got to the stage where we have got a commonly agreed tool kit for everywhere, but in some countries we have been using the same sort of formulation.

  Q310  Chairman: Can I ask about that context because in your memorandum to the Committee[12] you talked about economic issues fuelling conflict and you said: "There is a growing international awareness of the links between conflict and economic issues such as trade". Can I ask, at what point if you are going into a country which is in conflict or post-conflict do you involve the DTI? They are not part of the Conflict Unit, which I think is just Defence, the Foreign Office and DFID, yet there are quite a lot of issues it seems to me where the DTI needs to be engaged whether it is conflict commodities or trade rules, and there seems to be a significant omission.

  Hilary Benn: To be honest, I cannot think of a case where I am aware that we have had that kind of conversation. I do not know whether you know, Jim.

  Mr Drummond: I do not know.

  Q311  Chairman: You also say that, and this is in your memorandum about business behaving more responsibly, the Ethical Trading Initiative which I did ask the DTI questions on the last time around, and you have talked about licences being required for conflict-sensitive goods. It says: "The Criteria proved an effective mechanism to deny licences where there is concern that goods might be used for internal repression or international aggression, a risk to regional stability, or other considerations, including the effect on sustainable development." How many licences have been refused?

  Hilary Benn: Are you talking about arms export licences there?

  Q312  Chairman: Not necessarily. This is in the memorandum submitted by the Department, paragraph 31, where you are asking the question, how can the UK encourage conflict-sensitive business practices? It says: "As part of its implementation of the Guidelines the OECD Investment Committee is developing a `Risk Management Tool'. HMG also contributes to conflict sensitive business practice through its export licensing policy."

  Hilary Benn: My understanding is that is referring to the arms export licensing policy—I am sorry if that was not made clear in the memorandum—because those criteria in the final sentence are the ones that form the consolidating criteria against which arms export licences are assessed.

  Q313  Chairman: It only applies to arms licences?

  Hilary Benn: That is my understanding, yes.

  Q314  Chairman: If it was related to other goods or commodities which might be seen to be fuelling conflict, there is no—

  Hilary Benn: There is no licensing mechanism relating to those, is there? No, it is just arms exports.

  Chairman: I am not quite clear on the point about arms and sustainable development and the nuclear weapons aspect.

  John Battle: There is a list by which people have to assess whether—

  Q315  Chairman: Secretary of State, there are clearly issues here where the DTI's involvement is important if you are trying to take out the factors for conflict. The answer you were saying that there is not a mechanism, it seems to me, is an area for more useful earlier co-operation.

  Hilary Benn: It depends which way the trade is flowing. The Kimberley Process and the FLEGT[13] process—fisheries do not tend to be involved in conflict—are two examples of where we have got mechanisms that we are pursuing to try and deal with illegal use of natural resources and I think those do provide us with some way of trying to deal with a very practical problem. As far as licensing of stuff coming from the UK going to countries, to be honest, I am struggling to think of what kind of products we would be talking about that would be fuelling conflict, goods that would be exported from the UK apart from arms.

  Chairman: I think on the issues of trade and other things, we might cover that in our own report. There seems to be a role for DTI which does not appear to be as high on the list as it should be.

  Q316  Mr Davies: Before I get on to the issue of conflict, I want to take you back to what you were saying earlier on about conditionality because you know this is something that interests me.

  Hilary Benn: Yes.

  Q317  Mr Davies: I had supposed that there were four cases in the last six or nine months where conditionality had been applied and sanctions triggered, and they were Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Palestine. You told the Committee this afternoon there is a fifth, which I did not know about, maybe colleagues did, which is Rwanda. I know that the Hamas case, the Palestine case, was a joint EU initiative and proceeded from the decision of the Council of Ministers. In the other three cases, did you make any attempt to get other donors, either our EU partners or indeed the international financial institutions or the United States, to go along with those sanctions, so as to prevent the effect of triggering sanctions being negated by other donors and, if you did make those attempts to get some kind of solidarity and coherence in the message being sent by donors to these governments in the light of their behaviour, how successful was that? To what extent was your initiative backed up by other donors?

  Hilary Benn: In taking the list, in the case of Rwanda, there were a number of countries that had the same conversation with the Government of Rwanda. At the time, they had announced publicly they were thinking of doing this and a lot of international pressure went on to Rwanda in that case. In the end, Rwanda did not do what it had threatened to do in those circumstances. In the case of Uganda, I can think of at least two other donors who have also withheld some of their payments and are currently considering what to do in the light of the outcome of the elections. In the case of Ethiopia, of course, all of the direct budget support donors acted in concert, so there was a complete unanimity of view, and, of course, in each of these cases, as you will know, Mr Davies, particularly in these circumstances, there is a lot of debate within country amongst all of the country representatives of the different donor organisations. For Kenya, there were not sanctions because, of course, we were not giving direct budget support to Kenya in the first place.

  Q318  Mr Davies: I thought you withdrew aid and I thought it was budget support, aid money, as a result of the failure of the new Kenyan Government to deal with corruption.

  Hilary Benn: That is not the case, we do not give—

  Q319  Mr Davies: There were no sanctions?

  Hilary Benn: We had taken the decision previously that we would not give direct budget support to Kenya precisely because of the concerns about corruption, so we give our support in other ways. In the case of Palestine, there has obviously been a view right across the donors that it would not be possible in current circumstances given the Hamas Government, to provide direct budget support.


12   Ev 106 Back

13   Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade. Back


 
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