Rohingya Refugees

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 16th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

First, let me clarify the point I made. Obviously, the ODA budget qualifies to pay for refugees from Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Effectively, what happened over previous years was not only that the budget moved from 0.7% to 0.5% but that some of it was taken up, quite rightly, by ODA spending on looking after people from Ukraine and Afghanistan. We can now see that the overseas aid budget being spent overseas is actually increasing. For instance, when it comes to Africa, next year the budget will be almost doubling, to well over £1 billion. On what we want to see with the Rohingya, clearly there is a huge refugee crisis. They are being looked after in Bangladesh. Ideally, when circumstances are right, they will be able to go home. In between now and then, I think we should learn the lesson of the Syrian refugee crisis, where we did a lot to help countries such as Lebanon and particularly Jordan to make sure that people were able to stay there, work there and build livelihoods there, and then, when it is possible, go home.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, looking specifically at the point the right reverend Prelate raised about the plight of the refugees in Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, will the Minister look again at what happened only last week, when 5,000 of those refugees were displaced from the shacks and tents in which they had been living as a result of a fire? The Minister invited us to look at the longer term. I reinforce what the noble Baroness, Lady Nye, said about the International Court of Justice, which has imposed interim provisional measures on the Burmese military, with the support of the British Government, which is extremely welcome. Will he raise at the Security Council the failure to implement that and will he have discussions with the National Unity Government about the long-term rights of the Rohingya, the Kachin, the Karen and the other ethnic and religious minorities? That is the fundamental issue: if someone is not an equal citizen in the new Burma that will emerge after the coup, nothing will change.

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

Fundamentally, the noble Lord is completely right about the interim measures which have been set out by the International Court of Justice. It is incumbent on the Government of Myanmar to make sure they are put in place and to abide by them. The noble Lord made the general point that what is required is an inclusive, federal state, where every ethnicity and every nationality can feel it has a part to play in the country and that it will benefit from the country’s resources. Obviously, we have this military Government, with whom we have very limited contact, but for the long-term future of Myanmar, that is the only answer.

Climate Change: Impact on Developing Nations

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to be able to respond to the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester and, on behalf of the whole House, to welcome him to his place. He is greatly admired here and, as a former Africa Minister told me only this morning, in another place too.

The right reverend Prelate has reminded us of the historical significance of his diocese. Christianity here is said to have had its origins in that part of the world, thanks to the efforts of St Birinus, the Apostle to the West Saxons. Like the right reverend Prelate, Birinus was a missionary, arriving just 37 years after Augustine came to Kent. He was also a predecessor of another saint in Winchester, St Swithin. With such illustrious forebears, we will expect great things of the right reverend Prelate.

The story of the right reverend Prelate’s diocese underscores the long-standing relationship between Church and state, the spiritual and temporal. In referring to Lancelot Andrewes, and his central role in the translation of the King James version of the Bible, the right reverend Prelate reminds us of its hugely influential role in shaping our culture, as well as that of the whole, wider English-speaking world.

The Bible was the right reverend Prelate’s lodestar while serving as executive leader of the Church Mission Society and in his parochial work in London and Paris, following his ordination in 1989, five years after he married Ruth, his wife. In 2018, following his appointment to Truro, and beyond his greatly admired diocesan work in Cornwall, he was asked to put his international experience to good effect. The Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, as we heard, asked him to prepare a report on global persecution. It followed a Times leader, which referred to persecution of Christians and said:

“We cannot be spectators at this carnage”.


Yet silent observers we have too often been.

Open Doors says that more than 360 million Christians suffer at least high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith, that in 1993 Christians faced high to extreme levels of persecution in 40 countries, and that that number had nearly doubled to 76 countries by 2023. When the right reverend Prelate launched his report in 2019, he said:

“If one minority is on the receiving end of 80% of religiously motivated discrimination, it is simply not just that they should receive so little attention … however, this must also be about being sensitive to discrimination and persecution of all minorities”.


In that landmark report, the right reverend Prelate painstakingly set out 22 recommendations, which sought to restore the importance of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the right to believe, not to believe or to change your belief. In giving FoRB—freedom of religion or belief—far greater definition, the Truro review was hugely influential, and I have no doubt that, in joining your Lordships’ House, the right reverend Prelate will bring an authoritative and greatly welcome voice to our proceedings and that from all our Benches we will wish him well in his time here.

Before concluding in the brief moments I have left to speak, I remind the Minister that the full implementation of the Truro recommendations is a manifesto commitment of His Majesty’s Government. I hope that he will look at the link between the implementation of recommendation 7 of the Truro report and genocide and, in the light of what we have seen in Sudan, Tigray, the Middle East and Ukraine, that he will agree to meet me to discuss my Private Member’s Bill on genocide determination and examine the impact of atrocity crimes, especially on developing nations. I would like him to look particularly at the situation in Nigeria and the absurd suggestion—made, I might add, by a Head of State—that climate change was the cause of 40 people being murdered in a church in Ondo on Pentecost Sunday. That claim was strongly contested here, at a meeting I chaired for the Bishop of Ondo, Jude Arogundade.

Climate change and cuts to aid certainly impact development, but so does jihadist ideology, and we should not be frightened in saying so. On Red Wednesday, just a few weeks ago in November, I met Mr and Mrs Attah, two of the Ondo victims. Margaret’s legs were so badly damaged by the jihadist bomb that they had to be amputated. The couple wanted to know—and so do I—why no one has been brought to justice in this culture of impunity. Who is being brought to justice for the further 200 killings in Plateau State in Nigeria just two weeks ago, over Christmas? Why is Leah Sharibu—whose case I have raised regularly in your Lordships’ House and whose mother, Rebecca, I escorted to the Palace of Westminster so that she could meet Members of both Houses—still in captivity, having been abducted, raped and forcibly converted at the age of 14?

Persecution and conflict are major drivers in the displacement of 110 million people worldwide. These drivers destroy lives, such as those that I have just mentioned, and set back development. Conversely—and here I will finish—robust academic work demonstrates that, where persecution is contested and Article 18 freedoms are upheld, those countries are the most stable, the most harmonious and the most prosperous. I hope that the Minister, who I know takes a deep interest in some of these subjects, agrees and will commission more work to push policies based on the Truro recommendations higher up the political, diplomatic and development agenda.

The noble Baroness, Lady Northover, who has done so much on these issues over so many years, deserves and has our thanks for instigating today’s timely and important debate.

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, this has been an incredibly thoughtful and incisive debate, but I gently remind the House that it is time-limited. We want to hear everyone’s contributions and have time for the Minister to answer the questions raised. I therefore make a plea: if all noble Lords could stick to time, that would be marvellous.

Trial of Jimmy Lai

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The Sino-British declaration is a bilateral agreement registered with the United Nations. It is vital that we continue to raise it when we think it is being abused or when measures are being taken that are not in keeping with it or the values that underpin it, and we do that regularly. I have a list—I do not have time to relay it to the House now—of the times when we have raised these issues and examples of our continuing to raise them both bilaterally and multilaterally. I entirely agree with the noble Baroness that words are just that: words. The actions one can take when one side of a party is failing to sustain a bilateral agreement are very difficult to take, but we will continue to find all methods to raise the importance of this declaration.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my non-financial interests as listed in the register. I know Jimmy Lai and his family personally, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and I are sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party. Is this Stalinesque show trail of Jimmy Lai not a moment of reckoning for all who claim that they value the rule of law, human rights, press freedom and democracy? Is it not a moment of reckoning for the duplicitous belief that you can deepen trade deals while United Kingdom citizens and 1,762 political prisoners are incarcerated in Hong Kong jails? In calling for Mr Lai’s immediate and unconditional release, can the Minister say what practical steps we are giving him and his family? Do we intend to respond robustly if other United Kingdom citizens are caught in this CCP spiders’ web? Why are we not sanctioning those responsible, as the noble Lord, Lord Collins, asked? What more will we do to expose this charade and travesty of a sham show trial that makes a mockery of justice and the rule of law?

North Korea

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Swire, in a powerful introductory speech, has set the scene brilliantly in providing us with an analytical and sharp analysis of the situation in North Korea. The whole House is indebted to him for initiating this important debate. I declare my role as co-chair, with Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, and my non-financial interests in the register.

It is 70 years since the Korean War armistice. Millions died in that war, including more than 1,000 British service personnel, who lost their lives fighting for the freedoms now enjoyed in the south but not in the north. Last weekend we commemorated the 75th anniversaries of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the convention on the crime of genocide. The UDHR was to be

“a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations”.

Keep its universal application in mind as we consider North Korea. Keep it in mind in reflecting on an interview just last week with an escapee who had managed to get out of North Korea, with his family, in a small boat. Among other things, he described how he had been forced to watch the execution of a 22 year-old man who had been caught listening to South Korean music and watching banned movies.

Keep our commitment to the UDHR and the genocide convention in mind as we consider that 2023 is also the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations commission of inquiry into human rights violations in North Korea. Led by the eminent Australian jurist his honour Mr Michael Kirby, it was, in the words of the United Nations, mandated

“to investigate the systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with a view to ensuring full accountability, in particular for violations which may amount to crimes against humanity”.

When it reported in 2014, it concluded that North Korea is “a state without parallel”. It called for North Korea to be referred to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. Indeed, in pursuing the failure of the UN to take forward the recommendations of the UN’s own inquiry, our all-party parliamentary group established a parliamentary inquiry. It followed up the continuation of human rights violations in North Korea from 2014 until 2021, and found that nothing much had changed in that respect since 2014. If anything, the situation was even worse.

The UN commission of inquiry left open the question of whether a genocide is taking place. Since then, further evidence has emerged of the deliberate targeting of religious groups, which would fall within the convention’s definition. I argue that the convention needs to be widened to include the targeting of political classes, whom Stalin’s Soviet Union did not wish—for good reason—to see included in 1948. The commission of inquiry found that, over five decades, hundreds of thousands of prisoners had been exterminated in political prison camps, and that in the lifetime of three generations, entire groups of people, including families with their children, had perished in those death camps because of who they were, not for any actions they had carried out. It was certainly an intent to eliminate, but not genocide in a technical sense. Justice Kirby proposed a new term, politicide, to describe the atrocities. The commission unanimously concluded that the state has committed crimes in North Korea that definitely amount, in a technical sense, to crimes against humanity, and it concluded that those responsible should be arraigned before the courts and brought to justice.

In this 75th year of both the genocide convention and the universal declaration, it is worth returning to the foundation documents. In the case of the UDHR, it is difficult to see which of the 30 articles, if any, North Korea is not in breach of.

Article 1 of the UDHR insists that:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”.


Article 3 insists that:

“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”.


Without that right to life, of course, all other rights are worthless. Article 4 abjures slavery, yet 90% of the wages of North Koreans who are able to work overseas are confiscated. Article 5 asserts that torture, mental or physical,

“inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”

is not permissible. Article 6 insists on the rule of law. Article 12 states that no one will be subjected to arbitrary interference with privacy, family or home. Article 13 requires the right to leave a country. Article 14 states that where there is persecution, other countries must provide asylum. Article 17 provides

“the right to own property”.

Article 18 upholds the right to religious belief. Article 19 supports

“the right to freedom of opinion and expression”

and to seek and receive information regardless of frontiers. Article 21 provides for democratic government. Article 25 deals with the right to food and care, and Article 26 with the right to education.

How far North Korea is derelict in breaching article after article of the UDHR, and how far the international community has been derelict in failing to act on the findings of the UN’s own commission of inquiry, can be seen by a cursory examination of the COI’s findings.

It unequivocally concluded that North Korea had systematically violated human rights, including freedom of thought, expression and religion, the right to food, and more besides. The state has committed crimes against humanity including—in the COI’s exact words—

“extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation”.

It found

“systematic, widespread and gross … unspeakable atrocities … on a vast scale”,

amounting to

“crimes against humanity”,

and Justice Kirby said they were

“strikingly similar”

to crimes committed by Nazi Germany. The COI said the gross violations and crimes are

“ongoing … because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place”.

That was true in 2014; it is true now.

In the light of the evidence which has emerged from those thousands of escapees—there are around 30,000 in the Republic of Korea and there are about 1,000 in this country—Karim Khan KC, the prosecutor for the ICC, should examine further the testimonies of those who were incarcerated, or whose loved ones perished in the prison camps, because of their beliefs and consider whether this does indeed meet the test of genocide convention. If he is unable to do this because of the likely blocking vetoes of China or Russia—as in the case of the failure to refer the COI findings to the ICC—an independent people’s tribunal should be established to consider that evidence. This could be modelled on the very successful Independent Uyghur Tribunal that looked at the evidence of genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, and was chaired by the eminent lawyer Sir Geoffrey Nice KC.

In 2017, the UN Human Rights Council voted to look for legal strategies for eventual prosecutions and authorised the creation of a central repository for evidence—which was the right call—but prosecution has not occurred. I hope the Minister, who I know has followed this in great detail and cares about it as passionately as I do, will tell us more about where the accountability process and the question of impunity have now reached.

Changes of Administration in both the Republic of Korea and the United States have also played their part in dampening the quest for accountability, although I strongly welcome the Republic of Korea’s most recent insistence—echoed in a conversation I was privileged to have with President Yoon during his very welcome recent visit to the United Kingdom and to this Parliament—that his Government will champion the human rights of North Koreans. That is very welcome indeed.

While international justice for crimes is needed, we must also look at other options, including under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Such prosecutions in the UK would most likely not be possible because of the very limited scope of Section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act 2002. This is an issue that has been raised by experts in the field and the noble Lord is aware of it. Until we reform our law—which perhaps an incoming Government might consider doing—other countries, such as Germany and Argentina, which have broader universal jurisdiction, should be encouraged to address the growing impunity for these atrocity crimes in North Korea.

On 15 November of this year, the UN General Assembly adopted, by consensus in the Third Committee, a resolution on the situation of human rights in the DPRK. It drew attention to

“all-pervasive and severe restrictions, including an absolute monopoly on information and total control over organised social life … further tightened by Covid 19 prevention measures”.

The resolution related that these measures have led to

“food insecurity, severe hunger, malnutrition, widespread health problems and other hardship in the population”.

The prison camps, with an estimated 100,000 people being held there, are characterised by torture, brutality and degradation.

This is a country which, according to the 2021 report of the US State Department, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, spends a staggering $4 billion on armaments, an estimated 26% of its GDP—the highest proportion among the 170 countries it reviewed. Yet it is also a country where people starve and live in acute poverty, while its leaders wallow in luxury. The Telegraph reported earlier this week that dictator Kim had been seen riding in four new foreign vehicles, including a $200,000 armoured Mercedes-Maybach sedan. It brings to mind comparisons with the Communist dictatorship of Ceausescu in Romania.

In the face of all that, it was therefore surprising—as the noble Lord, Lord Swire, alluded to—that, on 8 December, the UK Government announced a package of sanctions targeting individuals linked to human rights abuses around the world. However, despite announcing a total of 46 sanctions, the Government did not impose any sanctions on certain North Korean individuals and entities about whom overwhelming evidence, including the FCDO’s own annual human rights reports, demonstrates their responsibility for serious human rights violations. Although it is welcome news that the UK is actively using the global human rights sanctions regime—Magnitsky sanctions—to hold to account officials in Belarus, Haiti, Iran and Syria who are complicit in repressing individual freedoms, why was there no mention of North Korea? Perhaps the Minister will tell us.

It also underlines why a parliamentary Select Committee should be given power to meet in camera, where necessary, to oversee this opaque and random process. Over the years, I have made over 400 interventions about North Korea in Parliament—in Questions, letters and meetings around this building. It is 21 years since I first raised the issue of the repatriation of escapees, which the noble Lord, Lord Swire, touched on. I did so in that first instance after a North Korean escapee came here to give his testimony. He described the plight of repatriated refugees:

“Some have been executed … When returned, they face torture, interrogation, and humiliation. Any woman who is returned and became pregnant while in China is forcibly aborted, supposedly to avoid the birth of babies ‘contaminated’ by foreign influences. There are reports of repatriated North Koreans being corralled and bound together, with wire being passed around their wrists and through their noses”.


That was testimony given in the Moses Room here in the Palace of Westminster.

Hundreds more were recently repatriated, and I have repeatedly urged the Government to raise this failure to protect refugees with the People’s Republic of China, not least because the Republic of Korea is willing to give sanctuary and a new life to every single one of them. I have received the supine and hand-washing response that

“it is for the parties involved to interpret their obligations under this agreement”.—[Official Report, 30/4/03; col. WA 104.]

We are talking about the 1951 refugee convention, of which China, which sits on the UN Human Rights Council, is in breach.

My noble friend Lady Cox, with whom I have travelled to North Korea, will speak specifically about the targeting of religious adherents, but the UN commission concluded that

“there is an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”.

The charity Open Doors has again listed North Korea in 2023—for the 19th time out of 20 years—as the state in which, worldwide, Christians face the greatest level of persecution.

In the face of all this, we must do more than making weak-tea statements of concern. We must call out issues such as forced repatriation, the breaking of sanctions over weapons of mass destruction, the links to Putin’s war machine and the day-to-day violation of human rights—and, specifically, a referral of the commission of inquiry report to the ICC. We must continue to break the information blockade—not by short-sighted reductions in the BBC Korea service—which the APPG campaigned to initiate.

Let me end on a hopeful note. In 2016, the then North Korean ambassador and his deputy asked to see me. He read me a long denunciation for raising cases of human rights and providing a platform for escapees. His deputy had been given the task of compiling all my Hansard speeches and interventions in this House. He subsequently told me that it was his job to be my spy. A few weeks after my defenestration, Mr Thae Yong-ho and his family defected. He later told me that, through his observance of our parliamentary democracy and way of life, he had been convinced by the democratic case for freedom, human rights and the rule of law. Today Mr Thae is an elected Member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea, representing the Gangnam district of Seoul. He recently took part online in a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group focusing on the likely fate of the escapees being repatriated by China. I hope that he is the advance party for what will one day be a united Korea that upholds the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and gives its people the freedoms and liberties enjoyed here, and indeed in the Republic of Korea.

Child Labour and Artisanal Cobalt Mining in the DRC

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to support international efforts to end the use of child labour from artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and to exclude cobalt from this source from the global supply chain.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, the use of child labour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains concerning. We regularly raise the issue of child labour in DRC’s artisanal cobalt mining sector both with the DRC Government and through multilateral fora such as the Human Rights Council.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. Will he initiate an urgent investigation into reports of children standing knee-deep with their bare skin in toxic pools mining for cobalt, study the research of Professor Siddharth Kara published in Cobalt Red and challenge the absurdity of companies relying on assurances from state-run Chinese companies in the Congo that human rights norms are met? Under the terms of the Modern Slavery Act, will he consider, for offences committed within supply chains, making offending companies subject to company disqualification, as with GDPR violations, and meet me and other noble Lords who are concerned about these issues to discuss kite-marking and how products can be labelled in a way that demonstrates they come from places where slave labour and child labour is being used, so consumers can make up their own mind about whether they want to be complicit in buying such products?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I would be happy to meet the noble Lord, and perhaps he could bring with him people who could help us to move forward. We are a world leader in this. We passed the Modern Slavery Act. We now have requirements on companies with a turnover greater than £36 million to define their supply chains very accurately to make sure that the awful images the noble Lord describes have no part in the supply of cobalt. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has 70% of the world’s cobalt. We want to make sure that it comes to the world market in a way that is complicit with the standards we require.

Ukrainian Holodomor

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the whole House is deeply indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Risby, for initiating today’s debate, for the way he introduced it and for the work that he has done for the people of Ukraine over so many years. In reinforcing his speech, I will divide my remarks into two parts—first, why the Holodomor matters in understanding events in Ukraine today and, secondly, why and how the determination of what is a genocide is an issue that still has to be resolved.

I first heard about the Holodomor when I visited Ukraine in 1989 with a small jubilee campaign delegation. I have never forgotten the sheer courage and determination of pro-democracy activists whom I met on the streets of Lviv as they risked their lives to throw off the shackles and chains of the Soviet Union. We met people whose family, in the preceding generation, had lost their lives in the Holodomor, Stalin’s mass starvation of Ukraine—the man-made famine that convulsed Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. As Stalin replaced Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punished independent-minded Ukrainians, the Holodomor—a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—led to millions of people dying. The writer Alex de Waal described the Holodomor as

“a hybrid … of a famine caused by calamitous social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population for repression or punishment”.

In Ukraine, I visited Greek Catholic churches that Stalin had closed 40 years earlier and where, every day, fresh flowers were defiantly left at the doors to replace the ones removed earlier by Soviet soldiers. Religious belief was violently repressed. I met courageous people, such as Bishop Pavlo Vasylyk and Ivan Gel, a politician and dissident, a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki group and the Ukrainian Christian Democratic Party. Between them, they had spent 17 and 18 years in the Soviet death camp at Perm. I met a young priest who as a punishment had been sent three years earlier to Chernobyl, without any protective clothing, to clear radioactive waste.

Those people wanted this story known, and I was grateful to the BBC and the Independent newspaper for enabling us to do so. Stories matter, not least the story of the Holodomor, because we forget too easily the price that has been paid for our liberties. The stories matter because they illustrate why, even as we meet here at Westminster, Ukrainians are fighting to the bitter end to protect their hard-won freedoms, and why they will resist Putin’s attempts to resurrect a Russian empire, which ultimately means the death of their nation. They will resist his attempts to crush democratic rights and sovereignty, to roll the clock back and reverse the gains made across Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Putin’s deluded idea that these brave people would line the streets with flowers, cheering the new imperial occupation and the reconquest of their country, simply beggars belief.

Since Putin instigated his illegal war, under the obscene pretext of protecting people from genocide, I have often thought about the people I met then and since, and about the courage and bravery of Ukraine’s anti-Soviet, faith-led, pro-democracy movement. I have often thought about the price of political progress and the illegal demonstrations I attended where Ukrainians, in their thousands, proudly held aloft their blue and yellow flags of defiance, and how religious freedom had been so violently repressed. As I have watched the consequences of Putin’s orders to destroy vast acres of arable land and their crops, to prevent grain reaching hungry people in the developing world, especially Africa, and to abduct and remove Ukrainian children, I have thought back to the conversations I had 35 years ago about Stalin’s Holodomor.

Stalin’s Holodomor, like Putin’s today, was an entirely manmade catastrophe, leading to anything from 3.5 million to 5 million deaths, or possibly the figure that the noble Lord, Lord Risby, gave the House: as many as 10 million. However, motive not numbers is the issue in determining genocide. I will come back to that later, but many historians regard this technically, formally and properly as a genocide. The Holodomor was methodically planned; it was executed by denying the producers of the food the sustenance necessary for survival. It seems especially cruel and perverse to have used food as a genocidal weapon in the breadbasket of Europe. As Ukrainians resorted to eating grass and acorns—even cats and dogs, as we have heard—Stalin banned any reference to famine. His “Five Stalks of Grain” decree stated that anyone, even a child, caught taking produce from a collective field could be shot or imprisoned for stealing socialist property. In 1933, 2,000 people were executed. While people were starving to death in the terror famine, the Soviet state stole over 4 million tonnes of Ukraine’s grain, enough to meet the needs of 12 million people in a year.

In 1997, I founded the Roscoe lectures, a public lecture series hosted by Liverpool John Moores University, and in 2009 I invited the writer, Anne Applebaum, to give one of those lectures. It was entitled Hitler and Stalin: the 20th Century’s Cruellest Tyrants. Subsequently, in 2018, she published her magnificent Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. In it, she says the famine launched by the Soviet leadership was

“a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.”

In harrowing testimonies, we hear from Tetiana Pavlychka, who remembered that her sister Tamara

“had a large, swollen stomach, and her neck was long and thin like a bird’s neck. People didn’t look like people— they were more like starving ghosts.”

Applebaum quotes another survivor who remembered that his mother

“looked like a glass jar, filled with clear spring water. All her body that could be seen . . . was see-through and filled with water, like a plastic bag.”

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Applebaum was able to access previously unseen archival material, which she says

“backs up the testimony of the survivors … Starvation was the result … of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.”

She cites extraordinary statistics, which graphically illustrate the scale of the deaths and the lives cut short—the noble Lord, Lord Risby, referred to this. Applebaum says that females born in Ukraine in 1933

“lived, on average, to be eight years old. Males born in 1933 could expect to live to the age of five.”

Such terrible experiences were within the living memory of some of those I met in 1989. Others had been told the stories by parents and grandparents, who had vowed never to forget and to use every sinew to struggle for a free Ukraine. Lest anyone imagine that such shocking experiences can easily be expunged or erased, as the son of a native Irish speaker, I can say that my mother told me the stories of the Irish famine which had occurred 100 years earlier. The deaths and emigration of millions poisoned British-Irish relations for decades afterwards.

What memories are being made in Ukraine today? In addition to the daily bombing of civilians, the appropriation of Ukrainian territory and mass displacements, Putin is a mirror image of Stalin and he is committing food terrorism by purposefully destroying Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure and stealing Ukrainian grain and agricultural machinery. I initiated the debate about this in your Lordships’ House on 21 July this year. Since then, we have seen vivid footage of his militias setting fire to fields, scorching the earth and reducing crops to ash. There have been reports from eastern Ukraine of people drinking water from radiators and puddles, and even killing and cooking stray dogs to avoid starvation, as we have heard.

It is clear why memories of the past are so relevant in the present, yet most people in Britain have never heard of the Holodomor and that should not be the case. That the crime was committed by a communist regime does not make it any less bad than a crime committed by a Nazi regime.

I commend James Bartholomew of the Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism, which has been working to make the Holodomor better known. It has created a school assembly plan and two lesson plans, all of which are free to download from its website. It has actively promoted these resources to schools. It also recently produced a booklet on the subject and metal lapel badges. It held a competition to design a candleholder with “Holodomor” clearly displayed, so that on the appropriate day people can place a candle in their front window and passers-by will know why. The Holodomor should find more of a place in the national curriculum or the exams set by the various exam boards. I hope the Minister will comment on that proposal when he replies.

The noble Lord, Lord Risby, alluded to a second matter, which I also want to raise. Last year, Dr Ewelina Ochab and I published State Responses to Crimes of Genocide. I gave a copy to the Minister, as it challenges the long-standing policy of the FCDO on the determination of what is and is not a genocide. It builds on the all-party amendments passed by this House with three-figure majorities, and Private Members’ Bills, the fifth and latest of which has just been selected again in this year’s ballot for new Bills. I am particularly pleased to see my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead in the Chamber, because his expertise and knowledge was enormously helpful in framing the amendments to the Trade Bill.

Two recent Prime Ministers agreed with us that the determination should be made by the High Court of England and Wales, not by politicians. The FCDO prevented that change, while trotting out the repeated line that only a court could decide, knowing that no court is in a position to do so. A former Minister and Member of this House told me that it is a deliberate sleight of hand.

In the case of the Holodomor, the Canadian Government, Australian Parliament, United States Congress and others listed in the excellent House of Lords note for this debate labelled the Holodomor as a genocide by Stalin’s Soviet regime. In November 2022, the German Federal Parliament passed a resolution put forward by the parties of its coalition Government declaring the Holodomor a genocide, as did the European Parliament in December 2022.

As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Risby, during a House of Commons debate in May, Leo Docherty MP, a Minister at the FCDO, said that the UK Government’s policy would ensure that genocide determinations remain

“above politics, above lobbying and above individual, political or national interests”.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/05/23; col. 518.]

In reality, however, the refusal to allow the English courts to make this decision means that genocide determination remains entirely political and subject to all the things that Mr Docherty says he opposes. It is an illusionist’s conjuring trick worthy of Houdini. The new Foreign Secretary has the chance to put this right. Of course, the Chinese, who refuse even to allow a debate about reports concerning Uighurs at the UN, might not like it.

The Holodomor, like the Armenian genocide, which is also unrecognised by the FCDO, was about the targeting of a specific group of people. Ukrainians were subjected to mass starvation, exile and displacement, were sent to gulags and suffered grievously. This Soviet genocide was of a piece with other communist genocide in Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. As we watch the crime of starvation waged against the Ukrainians right now, we need to recollect that this is not the first time that this crime has been committed against them.

I draw the Minister’s attention to the following, from Dr Ochab:

“A newly published investigation of the Starvation Mobile Justice Team, a team of experts supporting the work of Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General, has revealed evidence of starvation tactics used by Russian soldiers. As they said, the techniques were ‘designed to break the Ukrainian people.’ Their findings, published on June 2, 2023, indicate that they collected credible evidence of numerous incidents recorded in Chernihiv that help to establish a track record of ‘repeated and/or coordinated attacks resulting in objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population being targeted’”.


Global Rights Compliance has called for the prosecution of the crime of starvation and says that it is crucial to explore the crime of starvation against the definition of genocide in Article II of the genocide convention. Is the Foreign Office involved in helping to do that? Global Rights Compliance says that

“mass starvation has long been described as a ‘societal torture’”

and that

“when directed against—in the case of Ukraine—a national group, the concerted attack on the very foundation and fabric of such groups can be indicative of genocidal intent”.

To end, recognising past and present genocides for what they are is a step to ensuring justice and accountability and a step towards deterring and preventing future genocides—a word which itself means the breaking of the human family, the crime above all crimes. That is why this initiative from the noble Lord, Lord Risby, is so important and so welcome.

Libya Floods

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure the noble Lord would acknowledge that the response to the crisis in Morocco and in Libya has ensured that we have stood up funding based on the needs assessment and in line with the conversations we have had through UN agencies and, importantly, with the Libyan Administration. I spoke to the head of the Presidential Council, Mohamed al-Menfi, and extended the condolences of the United Kingdom. His Majesty the King has also sent a note. My right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary has spoken to Prime Minister Dabaiba in this regard. I am also looking to meet the appropriate Libyan Minister on the ground in New York when I depart for the UN later today.

We have ensured immediate, life-saving funding. As the noble Lord recognises, the situation in Libya is extremely complex. There are two warring sides. I have spoken directly to our chargé on the ground in Libya to ensure there is good co-ordination with all sides. We are hearing some reports, in this desperate situation, of good co-ordination, but so much more needs to be done. The main issues are of access and logistics. On the eastern side of the country, from Benghazi, aid to all the affected areas has been hindered by people who are stopping it being delivered. They are hindering the important humanitarian work as well.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister referenced the role of the United Nations. He will have seen reports that UNICEF says that some 300,000 children have been affected and that the number is rising. Is he able to give the House any more information about this? He will have also seen that UNICEF has launched its own appeal. Can he tell us whether the disasters appeal in the United Kingdom is concentrating on both Libya and Morocco? Is he confident that the aid needed in Morocco is now reaching its desired intentions and purposes at first hand? As the Minister knows, there were complaints about how slowly it was being taken up.

Ukraine

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I assure my noble friend we are doing just that. We are working with key partners in this respect, including the International Criminal Court and Karim Khan. The numbers run into hundreds, but I will update my noble friend when I have exact numbers that I can share with him.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, has the noble Lord seen reports this week that children are also being sent to Belarus? Will he ensure that the International Criminal Court investigates that, along with the previous reports of abductions to Russia? In answering the substantive Question that was asked this afternoon, will he also refer to those countries that have aided and abetted Putin, including China and including Iran, which has provided weapons to the Russians?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that we are working with the International Criminal Court on all elements. The taking of children from Ukraine, be it to Russian territory or Belarus, is abhorrent, and we are very focused on and seized of this. This is part of the conversations we are having with the chief prosecutor at the ICC. On the wider question of the malign influence of Iran, we are well-versed in that. It supplies drones. The issue of China I have covered. We have seen China at least not block action at the UN Security Council, and that action is welcome.

Darfur: Risk of Genocide

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

To ask His Majesty’s Government, following the discovery of mass graves and an increase in crimes targeting non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, what assessment they have made of the risk of genocide in that region.

[The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)]

My Lords, the UK strongly condemns the abhorrent attacks on civilians across Sudan. Reports of atrocities, including the UN report of a mass grave in Darfur, are, of course, deeply disturbing. These atrocities need full and thorough investigation. Those responsible must be held accountable. The evidence suggests another crime against the people of Sudan. Our immediate priority is to stop the violence in Sudan, to ensure that civilians are protected, and to secure immediate safe and unfettered humanitarian access. We remain seized of the importance of investigating these attacks.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. Reports of mass graves come from Geneina, a place I visited during the genocide in Darfur, when hundreds of thousands died and 2 million people were displaced, many of them fleeing to Chad. The Minister will recall the recommendations in the All-Party Group on Sudan and South Sudan’s report, which was published in April following the inquiry that I chaired, warning of the risk of a new genocide in Darfur.

How are we fulfilling our duties, in this 75th anniversary year, under the convention on the crime of genocide, which places on us and on the international community the duty to predict, prevent and punish those responsible for atrocities, targeted in this case at non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur? How are we assisting the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan KC, who told the United Nations Security Council last week that we are

“in peril of allowing history to repeat itself”?

He said that Darfur is

“not on the precipice of a human catastrophe but in the very midst of one. It is occurring”.

Are we collecting the evidence? Are we protecting those at risk? Are we stopping that catastrophe unfolding?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor. That is why we are working very closely with him. He gave that evidence last Thursday, during the UK presidency. It is also important that he recognised that the ICC has a continuing mandate during this conflict and in Darfur. As the noble Lord will know, it is directly investigating whether genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes generally have occurred. We are very much focused on that.

On evidence collection, we have a central unit within the FCDO that allows us to collect some of the evidence remotely. There are issues of access in Darfur. I remember visiting Darfur myself, and the challenges were still immense when there was access. However, as I said, the first step must be a resolution on a cease- fire between the two warring sides to allow for a full assessment to be made.

China

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, in making my brief contribution. I thank her for her initiative in bringing this debate to us and for setting out the issues so well.

I am a patron of Hong Kong Watch and a vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Groups on Hong Kong and Uighurs. My family and I have been sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party.

In 2019, I was part of the international team that monitored the last free and fair elections in Hong Kong. Earlier today during Question Time, I highlighted the fate of some of the legislators and pro-democracy activists whom I met. Some, such as British citizen Jimmy Lai, whom I know, are among the 1,200 incarcerated in Hong Kong jails. Others are among the exiles, such as Nathan Law, who is resident in the United Kingdom. On each of their heads a bounty of 1 million Hong Kong dollars has been placed. Their only crime is to believe in democracy.

The Chinese Communist Party has suppressed every last vestige of democracy, free speech and the rule of law, turning its courts into a mere tool of the CCP in implementing the draconian national security law. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, who said last night that those remaining British judges lending respectability to the CCP’s courts should search their consciences.

By contrast, the admirable, courageous heroism of the defenders of Hong Kong’s freedoms is of a piece with the protestors who were massacred in Tiananmen Square in April 1989. Who can forget the solitary defiance of “Tank Man”, who stood in the square in front of a CCP tank? Such individual acts inspire and keep alive the hope that, as in Berlin in November 1989, even the most solid-looking walls can be brought down.

My friend Bob Fu was among the protestors who survived the massacre and subsequently escaped. He says:

“It was really absolutely shock because we had never imagined, by sitting in the peaceful Tiananmen Square—which, translated literally, is Square of Heavenly Peace—our so-called people’s government would send the so-called People’s Liberation Army to shoot its own people”.


Until July 2020, Hong Kong was one of the remaining cities in China where, as we heard, people were free to publicly commemorate Tiananmen and to honour the lives of those who were murdered at the hands of the CCP. For organising the candle-lit vigils in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, activists such as the lawyer Chow Hang-tung are now behind bars facing the prospect of many years in prison under the national security law.

All this is of a piece. The silencing of British parliamentarians, exiled legislators and activists all demonstrates that the CCP is literally scared stiff of dissent. That is why they are using bounties, arrest warrants and threats of extradition to close down debate. It is why they try to remove all references to Tiananmen and to censor schoolbooks and the internet. Add to this the way in which the CCP tries to extend its long arm to reach overseas and threaten the well-being and safety of pro-democracy activists who are under the protection of the UK Government, and it is pretty clear what kind of authoritarian regime we are dealing with.

I include in that number the significant BNO community and students at universities such as Southampton, who were recently set upon by CCP thugs. I remind the Minister of the attack on peaceful protestors outside the consulate in Manchester, by consular officials. As I noted in my remarks during our defence debate last Friday, disappointingly, the United Kingdom Government continue to send the CCP very mixed messages when it comes to the value that I know the Minister places on human rights and the international treaty guarantees that supposedly uphold Hong Kong’s autonomy, which the CCP has trashed.

The genius of “one country, two systems” has been replaced by the totalitarian model of “one system, one party”. Is it any surprise that the CCP thinks it can get away with this, and with encouraging the illegal use of bounty-hunters on UK soil and threatening the safety of British overseas nationals, when, for instance, we continue to drag our feet on stripping out a million Chinese-made surveillance cameras from government departments and the public sector supply chain? Does Xi Jinping take the UK seriously when, after three years of a relentless and unprecedented crackdown in Hong Kong, the Foreign Secretary is chomping at the bit to visit Beijing to sign investment and trade agreements with China—a country with which we have a trade deficit of over £40 billion? So much for promoting national resilience and less dependency.

Does the Minister believe that it is licit to do business as usual with a country credibly accused by the House of Commons and President Biden, among others, of committing genocide against Uighurs in Xinjiang? If not, why was a Minister from this House sent to Hong Kong to deepen trade deals? Can we really claim that we take national security seriously when so many of our academic research institutions continue to pursue sensitive research partnerships on dual-use technology with Chinese universities with links to the People’s Liberation Army?

Ministers and officials are responsible for the safety of our citizens at home and our international treaty responsibilities overseas, but in two reports from our House of Lords International Relations and Defence Select Committee we concluded that British policy represents “a strategic void”. When it comes to keeping its word on these issues, you cannot believe a word that the Chinese Communist Party and its chairman Xi Jinping say. Tiananmen, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan all reinforce that message.