Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill

My dissatisfaction with those replies, and in the context of my involvement in the legislative stages of the 2015 Act, my pro bono role as a trustee of the charity Arise, and as vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uighurs, prompted me to speak in Committee on this Bill on 19 May, and again on Report, on 29 June, when I moved an all-party amendment to the Bill. Co-sponsors of that amendment were the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who is in his seat today, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and my noble friend Lady Falkner. Two of them will be speaking to this group today.

In a series of powerful speeches from right across the Chamber—with only one partially dissenting voice—Members of you Lordships’ House made clear their deep anxiety that the Government were ready to hand over up to 35% of our 5G infrastructure to Huawei, a company that actively partners with the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang, where 1 million Uighur are incarcerated and used as slave labour. Parallels were drawn, during the course of that debate, with the way in which companies such as Siemens had used labourers in Nazi concentration camps to build an industrial empire, and the way in which Stalin used gulag labour to power his economic programmes on the backs of those who had been incarcerated.

In June, the Minister asked us not to divide the House but said that she would be willing to return at Third Reading—today—with an amendment to provide a human rights threshold which companies would be required to meet. It was also suggested that the Telecommunications (Security) Bill would be a more appropriate piece of legislation on which to attach such an amendment. I would be grateful if, when the Minister comes to reply, she can confirm that the title of that Bill has been drawn in such a way as to exclude that possibility.

Since June, meetings have been held with the noble Baroness and Ministers from the Department of International Trade, the Home Office and the Foreign Office. The debate also triggered a determination to lay further amendments both to the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill and to the Trade Bill. I know that the Minister has genuinely and faithfully tried her very best to honour the commitment that she gave to the House in June, and I really am grateful to her for the time and trouble she has taken throughout.

Let me remind the Government and the House why this issue is not going to go away quietly, and why the House will have the chance, on Tuesday next, to demonstrate that. Academics have described Xinjiang as the world’s most shocking example of state-sanctioned slavery. In Committee, I drew the Government’s attention to the work of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and quoted the institute’s Vicky Xu, who said that the idea that Huawei is not working directly with the authorities in Xinjiang is just “straight-up nonsense”.

I sent the Minister a video recording of shackled and blindfolded Uighur Muslims being led from trains to camps. The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, whose own family suffered the grotesque horrors of the Shoah— commemorated yesterday, on Holocaust Memorial Day—said that such scenes were

“reminiscent of something not seen for a long time”.

I know that the Minister shares the sense of revulsion that we have all felt on learning of forced sterilisations and forced abortions for Uighur women, to prevent births within their community; the desecration of Uighur cemeteries to eradicate any trace of their identity; the deliberate separation of family members; propagandised re-education; and their exploitation as forced labour. Indeed, she drew my attention to an article in The Economist, setting out the scale and nature of what is being done. We all need to have a better understanding of what it really means when we see a label that says: “made in China”. Who made it? How was it made? Under what conditions was it made?

By way of exchange with the Minister, I would draw her attention to an article in The Spectator that appeared on 23 January. It was written by Harald Maass. He gives the example of Coca Cola’s production plant, which he says is

“a joint venture with a Chinese state company … surrounded by prisons and re-education camps in which China suppresses local ethnic minorities”.

Within 30 kilometres of that plant, there are 25 prisons and internment camps. In the whole of Xinjiang, there are at least 380 internment camps, some of which have huge structures and watchtowers, barbed wire and thousands of inmates. An analysis of satellite imagery suggests that there are crematoria in at least nine of them. The Chinese Communist Party says that the camps are educational and training facilities. Precisely what purpose does a crematorium have in an educational facility?

Uighurs are forced to work for factories or farms making products, some of which are sold in the United Kingdom. Over the past two years, work programmes have been significantly enlarged, with official statistics showing that 2.6 million “surplus rural workers” in Xinjiang were “relocated” within one year—an increase of 46%.

In July, the Government responded to the concerns expressed about both the use of slave labour and the security challenges by announcing that they would be removing Huawei from the UK’s 5G mobile network. UK mobile providers have been banned from buying new Huawei 5G equipment and they will have to remove all its 5G kit by 2027. I think the Government’s decision is the right one, and they have taken notice of the concerns which were raised during the debate in your Lordships’ House. In December, they went on to publish the 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy, and I also welcome that.

But the Government have gone further. Last week, Dominic Raab announced more plans to outlaw Chinese imports which can be linked to human rights abuse, and there will be fines and possible sanctions against companies which are connected to slave labour. He told the House of Commons that he had been shocked by, in his words, “the industrial scale” of the forced labour and the concentration camps, saying that he had never again expected to see pictures of people being herded like animals on to trains to take them away from kith and kin to be enslaved and stripped of their humanity. Such echoes from a terrible past have also been heard in reports of human hair taken from the shaved heads of Uighur people being exported to be used in wigs by those who, sadly, seem equally comfortable wearing fashion items made by Uighur slaves.

We await news from the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, about how Magnitsky sanctions will be used against senior Chinese Communist Party officials who have overseen these programmes of mass incarceration. Perhaps the noble Baroness can give the House further information about when such action will be taken.

It is instructive that the US Government have already imposed sanctions and restrictions against 48 Chinese companies suspected of using forced labour or providing technical assistance to the suppression system of Xinjiang, described by the US Congress as the

“largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world”.

Adrian Zenz, a leading authority on Xinjiang, estimates that most of today’s cotton in Xinjiang is picked under forced labour conditions and with minimal payment. I particularly pay tribute to the BBC for highlighting this in a documentary recently. Zenz says:

“More than half a million Uyghurs — probably whether they want to or not — are being sent by the state to the fields for three months”.

Brands including Hugo Boss, Adidas, Muji, Uniqlo, Costco, Caterpillar, Lacoste, Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger have been named in reports linking them to Xinjiang factories or materials. One in five cotton products worldwide is made with Xinjiang cotton. To its credit, Marks & Spencer has pledged to stop using any cotton from Xinjiang.

Next week, on Tuesday, the House will be asked to vote again on the all-party genocide amendment to the Trade Bill, which was passed in your Lordships’ House by a formidable majority of 126. In the House of Commons, with the equally formidable support of the former leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Nus Ghani Member of Parliament and other senior figures from the Government Benches, it came within 11 votes of achieving a majority. The movers of that amendment in both Houses have listened to constructive suggestions and have modified the amendment, which now stands in lieu and is on our Marshalled List.

There is no greater abuse of human rights than genocide: it is the crime above all crimes. No other word adequately describes a state complicit in the destruction of a people’s identity; complicit in mass surveillance; complicit in forced labour and enforced slavery; complicit in the uprooting of people, the destruction of communities and families, the prevention of births, and the ruination of cemeteries where generations of loved ones had been buried. It is the only word to describe a state which seeks to re-educate you so that you will believe that you, your people, your religion and your culture never existed, and the certainty that, through ethno-religious cleansing, you will cease to exist in the future.

Last week, I read the testimony of Sayragul Sauytbay, a woman who escaped from one of the camps. She said:

“Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons. There were prisoners who were made to sit on a chair of nails. I saw people return … covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails.”

One elderly woman’s skin had been flayed. She said:

“Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons”,

and that prisoners are used for medical experiments:

“Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.”

On the same day that the House of Commons voted on the genocide amendment from your Lordships’ House, the incoming and outgoing US Administrations both declared events in Xinjiang to be a genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at his confirmation hearing in the US Senate that:

“On the Uyghurs I think we’re very much in agreement. And the forcing of men, women and children into concentration camps, trying to, in effect, re-educate them to be adherents to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, all of that speaks to an effort to commit genocide.”

We will shortly be considering the National Security and Investment Bill, and I am sure that these issues will be raised again. Prior to that, we have the Trade Bill. Surely if the Government are committed to this issue, when we get to that Bill, it is obvious that the Government must accept the amendment on genocide. How could we possibly agree to trade with a country that is committing genocide?

I thank the Government for their engagement, including that of the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, with Sir Geoffrey Nice, the chair of the China Tribunal, on forced organ harvesting, and I look forward to further engagement. However, that engagement needs to turn into specific action. We cannot turn a blind eye, and I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, will make sure that we do not.

I want also to pay tribute to the 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy which was published last month. When I was the Secretary of State with responsibility for digital, we made the decision last year about who would be able to work to roll out better connectivity. It was absolutely clear that we must not find ourselves in the situation again of being overly reliant on one supplier; we need to have more suppliers in the chain. I think that the new US Administration will help us through working together to achieve that.

The noble Lord, with his amendment, has compelled the Government to act. He has outlined the fact that there will be another opportunity, next week in the Trade Bill, for the House to consider the very important matters that he and other noble Lords have raised. For the reason that our fellow citizens need better connectivity, and that those who live in flats or apartments must be able to ask their landlords to engage in connectivity issues, this Bill is much needed now on the statute book.

The Human Rights Act applies only to public authorities and other bodies—public or private—that perform public functions. There is no general requirement on companies to comply with human rights obligations, although that has sometimes been applied to the relationship between companies and private individuals. As others have said, there are UN guiding principles on human rights and business. The Companies Act 2006, the EU non-financial reporting directive 2014 and the Modern Slavery Act all contain commentary on human rights but none deals with this particular issue.

It is a shame that we have had to have this debate almost by proxy. Even the noble Lord, Lord Alton, would admit that this Bill was not designed to address this issue. Such a Bill is needed so that we can have this discussion in a discrete environment. I understand that my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones was promised that there would be a communications security Bill. I assume that the National Security and Investment Bill is what that has metamorphosised into—perhaps the Minister could confirm that. As my noble friend Lady Northover suggested, this issue could be discussed in that context. I am working on that Bill, but it seems to me to have to been drawn very narrowly. Given this legislative absence, it is appropriate that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and others have brought forward this amendment now. If the noble Lord, Lord Alton, decides to push it to a vote, we on the Liberal Democrat Benches will support it. If he does not, we shall support an amendment to the Trade Bill. Even if the noble Lord decides not to push for a vote today, the Government can be sure that this issue is not done with and will not go away.