UK – The Guardian, November 25, 2024
The former select committee chair is looking to change the way Britain deals with foreign hostage situations
Alicia Kearns, as a former Foreign Office official and an outspoken voice on foreign affairs, is an MP who understands how the department ticks.
She is also someone who does not give up easily, and with some freedom to operate since she is neither on Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative frontbench nor the Labour dominated foreign affairs select committee, a body she chaired until this summer.
That makes her a rarity in the Commons: knowledgable about foreign policy but free to express her often strongly held views. Kearns’ record heading up the committee was generally admired – but she has one unfinished piece of business to attend to.
With a small group of MPs and campaigners, she has set up an all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on arbitrary detention and hostage affairs. The aim is to pursue the recommendations of a report she helped publish called Stolen years, which made the case for the UK appointing a special envoy for hostage affairs. The recommendation was rejected.
This weekend, the Guardian reported calls from relatives of prominent detained Britons for the foreign secretary, David Lammy, to deliver on promises to help secure their freedom amid signs of resistance from diplomats.
Kearns is furious about the situation. “I have never come across a part of the Foreign Office that is more belligerent or unwilling to be reformed, or to accept reform in some way,” she says in an interview.
“The Foreign Office is always defensive, but I have never seen a level of defensiveness as I have on this. When we published our report it was quite incredible how unwilling they were to accept change.”
She insists the problem of British citizens being arbitrarily detained abroad is not a backwater issue. “I have always felt that the number one duty of governments is to keep people safe, and that is more true for the Foreign Office than many departments, and yet I felt that that was one of our biggest failings … It just felt like every family felt let down.”
She met Roger Carstens, the US special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, on whose role the UK special envoy idea is loosely based, and said she realised that American families “felt listened to, engaged with, supported, and that singular focus within government helped families”.
She added: “[They] took the geopolitics out of it and just focused on getting people home. That same singular focus of mission was missing for us.
“With the ambassadors, there is always the risk they will focus on the geopolitics and not getting people home. You need one person who knows what the trades are, knows what is likely to get someone out of a country, and knows why this country is worried about this person.”
