Baroness Crawley
Main Page: Baroness Crawley (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Crawley's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
It absolutely will go from bad to worse if trends continue. The actions the noble Lord described are reprehensible. We have been clear in our condemnation of Lukashenko’s actions in engineering a migrant crisis to try to undermine our partners in the region. We have deployed a small team of UK Armed Forces to Lithuania and Poland to provide support to address the ongoing situation at the Belarusian border. We are also supporting our humanitarian partners to help alleviate the suffering of migrants at the border, including through our contributions to the Disaster Relief Emergency Fund.
Baroness Crawley (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, welcome the leader of free Belarus today. Is the Minister aware that last week I spoke to the mother of young Dzmitry Zherbutovich, who wanted me to raise his prison treatment in our Chamber this morning? He is serving a five-year prison sentence in Belarus for the crime of standing in front of a water cannon. For the first year, he was forced to be in a five square-metre cell with 14 other prisoners, all of whom except Dzmitry smoked, with no ventilation and where they all had to stand during the day. Will the Minister put even more pressure on the Belarusian regime about its inhumane treatment of political prisoners?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I thank the noble Baroness for raising the case of young Dzmitry. I am not familiar with his case, but I am familiar with many others which are no less appalling. We are deeply concerned about the conditions in which political detainees are held in that country. Many of them have limited or no access to anything like proper healthcare and are subject to relentless interrogation, intimidation and psychological pressure techniques, all of which amount to a form of torture. This is contrary to Belarus’ international obligations to which the authorities have committed themselves on numerous occasions but continuously fail to uphold. We make our solidarity with political prisoners clear frequently, attend trials and engage with the families of political prisoners at every opportunity.