China: Genocide

Motion to Take Note

Moved by

That this House takes note of the reported remarks of the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs that a genocide is underway against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, China.

My Lords, in moving the Motion that the House takes note of the reported remarks of the right honourable Liz Truss MP, the Foreign Secretary, that a genocide is under way against the Uighur people in Xinjiang, I need to thank all noble Lords who will speak today. I declare that I am a vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uyghurs and a patron of the Coalition for Genocide Response, whose founders I thank—along with the Library of the House—for the briefing material which has been made available to your Lordships. Similarly, thanks are due to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, of which I am also a member.

Today’s debate on genocide has deep roots, stretching back to the still unrecognised genocide of 1915 against the Armenians. It was carefully studied by the Jewish-Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. More than 40 members of his own family were subsequently murdered in the Holocaust, the genocide of 6 million European Jews. Lemkin both created the word “genocide” and campaigned for the 1948 genocide convention, to which we acceded in 1970, and which ultimately led to the creation of the International Criminal Court.

Article II of the convention sets out what constitutes a genocide. This is not dependent on numbers killed—indeed, no killings at all are necessarily “required” if at least one or more of the five prohibited genocidal acts are proven—but it evaluates

“intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

As we debate what is afoot today in Xinjiang, recall how, in Europe, bureaucrats identified who was a Jew, confiscated property, used their victims as slave labour, scheduled trains to uproot them from their homes and communities, and deprived them of livelihoods and positions in society; and how German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners, confiscated personal property, shaved heads, sent hair, jewellery, and other artefacts as trophies, and then made prisoners build their crematoria.

Since 1948, we have witnessed genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, northern Iraq and Burma, and now in China. Repeatedly, we have failed to honour our convention duties to predict, prevent, protect and punish.

As a new member of the House of Commons, as long ago as November and December 1979, I criticised the failure to utilise the visit of the Chinese Communist Party’s chairman, Hua Guofeng, to raise with him the Cambodian genocide being perpetrated by the CCP’s allies, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The Government declined at the time to name it as a genocide.

In Darfur, Rwanda, northern Iraq and Burma, I have seen first-hand how the promise to break the relentless and devastating cycles of genocide has never materialised. Will it be any different in Tigray, where the warning signs for mass, ethnically targeted violence are flashing red?

My Lords, it is with great respect for the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that I say that he has provided the most incredible leadership in this House on what is happening to the Uighur people at the hands of the Chinese authorities. I have all too often made speeches in this House about the full horrors of the human rights abuses that are taking place there. I am not going to rehearse them all again today, but we know that what is happening is certainly one of the most grievous kinds of human rights abuses. When we signed the convention on genocide, we were committing to preventing genocide taking place. So, when our Foreign Secretary indicated that she, too, took the view that there was a genocide in train—that it was processing—she was really talking about the very thing that is to be prevented under the genocide convention.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I too am frequently in contact with people who give me accounts of what is happening to their family members or what has happened to them. As a lawyer, I look for evidence. A report published by Dr Laura Murphy of Sheffield Hallam University—a very impressive academic who is rigorous in the material she uses and the evidence she applies to her work—has indicated that slave labour is being used in Xinjiang province, in the internment camps, and should be a source of serious alarm to us all. As well as writing Laundering Cotton, she has also written a very important report pointing out that 35-40% of the polysilicon used worldwide in the creation of solar panels is created in this province and in the factories and camps where forced labour is used.

Her most recent report is on cotton, and it points out that 20% of the world’s cotton emanates from Xinjiang province and that the way it is produced should be a source of deep alarm. She relied on the first-person testimonies of people who had been held and managed to escape, of those who work in the internment camps as security staff or teachers, and of relatives of those in the camps. They reveal that minority citizens held in those camps are “forcibly sent” to work as part of their daily schedules. Participation in labour programmes is not voluntary; it is coerced through threats of imprisonment, and torture has regularly been used.

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for yet again bringing to the attention of your Lordships’ House, of the country and, I hope, of the Government the importance of looking at what is happening in China, particularly in the Xinjiang region. He has put such great effort into this that we need to stop and try to understand why the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office seems to find it so difficult to recognise a genocide going on. He made it clear that there are various ways of looking at a genocide; there are aspects of understanding it. Essex Court Chambers has made it clear that it believes that all aspects of genocide are visible in Xinjiang province.

This is not a new issue; it has not suddenly come on the horizon. We have been hearing about it and debating it for months, years or, in the case of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, decades. So why does the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office find it so difficult to acknowledge this as a genocide in progress, particularly if former Foreign Secretary and now Prime Minister Boris Johnson was baffled and the current Foreign Secretary sees it as a genocide in progress, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, has just pointed out? Surely if the Foreign Secretary believes that something is a genocide, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office should look very closely at it.

It is worth reading out an extract from an ICJ ruling from 2007 on the application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v Serbia and Montenegro. Paragraph 431 stated that

“a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available to it means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harbouring specific intent … it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit”.

My Lords, this is the first time that I have presumed to speak on the atrocities in Xinjiang, although I have followed previous debates with nothing short of admiration. I came to the subject by two slightly unorthodox routes: a professional interest in surveillance techniques, and an invitation to British experts in late 2015, backed by our respective Governments, to talk to the Chinese about counterterrorism. We were politely received, but I cannot claim that the presentation that I gave with the defence attaché on lessons learned from the excessive use of internment in early 1970s Northern Ireland had the slightest impact. Indeed, it later transpired that, as we were speaking, plans were being made elsewhere in Beijing for brutal mass internment on a scale unimagined since the Second World War. I declined the invitation to participate in the return leg of the dialogue.

To read accounts of so-called de-extremification in Xinjiang is to recall the torturer near the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four explaining Big Brother’s ability to strip Winston of his humanity:

“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

But the claim of genocide requires more than that—indeed, more even than proof of one or more of the terrible acts specified in the genocide convention. The perpetrator must be shown to have acted with the aim or desire of destroying a protected group, as a whole or in substantial part—a question which needs to be answered on the facts as they apply to each specific act and each specific defendant.

To see how demanding this test can be, let us take the horrendous human and logistical evidence of organ harvesting from healthy young Uighurs that was detailed this summer in Ethan Gutmann’s shocking interim report, The Killing of Innocents for their Organs. The author characterises what he believes to be taking place as “maintenance genocide”. However, if, for the sake of argument, it could be shown that such practices were intended only to ensure a source of supply for China’s notorious transplant industry, however murderous and inhuman the practice, the purpose of group destruction would not have been made out. To establish the responsibility of China itself, as the international law expert Alison Macdonald QC explained in her published legal opinion of January this year, would require either the genocidal intent of specified senior officials to be attributed to the state, or for genocidal intent to be

My Lords, I too pay tribute to my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Alton.

The summer of 1936 is a dark stain on British history, when in another attempt to appease Germany, Britain participated in the Berlin Summer Olympic Games. This event was orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels as an attempt to camouflage the Nazis’ racist, militaristic character, an attempt undermined by Adolf Hitler’s snub of Jesse Owens. This infamous moment was just one xenophobic and prejudiced step on the path to the Nazi genocide. Today, Britain finds itself in a chillingly similar position. Should we participate in the 2022 Winter Olympics, which will be hosted in China?

As we speak, Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang are being detained in concentration camps, with testimonies of torture and rape taking place daily. Mosques are being destroyed, imams have been imprisoned, and prayer has been listed as suspicious activity. We are witnessing a watershed moment and, if we choose to participate in these Games, we are repeating our same mistakes from 1936. As we know too well, if we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.

A few months before his passing, Lord Sacks of blessed memory published a post about the distressing developments in Xinjiang. He wrote:

“As a human being who believes in the sanctity of human life, I am deeply troubled by what is happening to the Uighur Muslim population in China. As a Jew, knowing our history, the sight of people being shaven headed, lined up, boarded onto trains, and sent to concentration camps is particularly harrowing. That people in the 21st century are being murdered, terrorised, victimised, intimidated, and robbed of their liberties because of the way they worship God is a moral outrage, a political scandal and a desecration of faith itself.”

This coming Sunday is the first night of Hanukkah. Jewish families across Britain and the world will stand by their windows as they light candles and tell the story of Hanukkah. The story tells the tale of religious persecution in an attempt to spread Hellenism. Antiochus seized the Jewish Temple, prohibited all Jewish practices and began the mass conversion, re-education and indoctrination of all Jews to the Hellenist lifestyle. A small group of Jews fought to regain control of Jerusalem, led by Judah the Maccabee. On re-entering the temple, the Maccabees went to light the Menorah; they found a small jug which contained just enough oil to last for one day, which lasted for eight—and thus the eight days of Hanukkah.

My Lords, I too pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for his tireless work in this area. I also share with him a sense of frustration—I feel as if I have stood up so many times as we have engaged with this issue, yet it seems that we are not able to confront it in a way that is really making a difference. Despite all our hopes of human progress, it is quite extraordinary that here we are, at the start of the 21st century, witnessing events such as we see and which are now well documented. There is no doubt that they are going on.

We are all too willing to use words such as “never again”. Year by year, we stand at the Cenotaph and pray for peace, but I note that, when Christ spoke, he said “Blessed are the peacemakers”. Peace is not simply the absence of strife; it is something that has to be fought for, time and again—it is something we have to make. Surely, of all things, as we want to be a global Britain and a force for good in the world, we must realise that this will be a costly battle. This will not come without any implications for us as a nation—perhaps that is the reason why so many people are reluctant to move on it.

Back in June, I wrote a piece called “‘Global Britain’ —A force for good or free trade power?” As I struggled with thinking through the issues, I came to the conclusion, reluctantly, that very often those two things are incompatible. We will not be able to have all the trade and free trade that we want if we are to be a global force for good. It is all too tempting to strike a Faustian bargain to maximise economic prosperity at the expense of foreign policy, or to accept that, in pursuit of the good, trade may be disrupted. That is especially true when it comes to China, given that our bilateral trade is more than £90 billion per annum. The question is not whether this is the price to pay for standing up for the Uighurs but whether the lives, welfare and future of the Uighurs as a people are the concession that we make to healthy economic ties with China.

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Alton has most admirably and in great detail set out the facts that confront us. I will not repeat what he said, because he has been an example to all of us in the way that he has brought this matter, time and again, before your Lordships’ House.

I suspect that I may be one of the few Members of your Lordships’ House, perhaps the only one, who has some direct experience, and indeed shared collective responsibility, of having failed to avert not one but two genocides—those in Rwanda and at Srebrenica—when I was Britain’s representative at the UN Security Council. Those were genocides that met the Government’s —in my view—narrow and legalistic criterion of being so judged by an international court. That experience scarred my conscience and demonstrated how defective the 1948 genocide convention was, lacking as it did any enforcement provisions or processes.

Following those two searing events, some progress was made to meet the challenges of prevention of genocide and retribution for it. In 1999, the International Criminal Court was established, albeit with a lot of signatories missing, and, in 2005, the “responsibility to protect” norm was endorsed unanimously at a UN summit. But neither of these steps forward has prevented further genocides being committed—most notably and unmistakeably, I would argue, in an instance mentioned by my noble friend Lord Alton, on the Yazidi community in northern Iraq and Syria by IS, for which, shamefully, no legal proceedings at the ICC have yet been instituted.

Now, in Xinjiang, evidence has emerged, validated by journalists, academics, and members of the Uighur community and their families, by technical means and by many Members of your Lordships’ House, of acts by the Chinese Government which undoubtedly constitute serious breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights against the Uighur people of that region and which, being based on ethnic and religious identity, resemble genocide or a prelude to it. Faced with this evidence, what has been the Government’s response? To repeat what I have called a narrow, legalistic definition of genocide, that only an international court can define it as such.

My Lords, we have just heard a very brave speech from the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, admitting the failures of the past with which he was inadvertently associated. We owe a great deal today, not only to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for what he has just said, but particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who has indeed been a leader in this particular case. I salute him for what he has done, persistently, not over months but over years and indeed decades, as somebody said. We are all in his debt. We are also in debt, in a lesser way, to our Library for producing such a useful paper as a background to today’s debate.

My parliamentary hero has always been that remarkable small man from Yorkshire, William Wilberforce, who, against all the odds in his time, spearheaded in Parliament the campaign against the slave trade, and then against slavery, and who, as he died, in 1833, was brought the news that the Bill abolishing slavery itself had passed through both Houses of Parliament. He can and should be an inspiration to us all. But, of course, as one evil is combated—and we have every reason in this country to be proud that we took a lead there—others arise. I was born just before the outbreak of the Second World War. I remember being taken to the cinema and seeing those newsreels from Belsen, from which my mother tried to protect me, but my father said I should see them and realise what evil mankind can be capable of. When I was a young Member of Parliament, in another place, I had the great honour of being chairman of the campaign for the release of Soviet Jewry.

Those were evils that were combated, but at enormous cost. And now, what are we to do to take a lead against unspeakable atrocities being committed in China? A great nation that persecutes its minorities can never be great in stature, however great it may be in size, and we have to realise that. No nation can be great in stature, as ours has been in the past, unless it is prepared to stand up and say, “This is something we cannot accept”. It is often said that he who sups with the devil must use a long spoon, and he who trades with a nation that is committing bestial atrocities against its own people has to say, “Where is our moral compass in all this?”