Hong Kong

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to be able to participate in this debate.

For decades, when visiting vibrant, colourful, lively, bustling Hong Kong, we have seen rapid change melded with Chinese culture, keeping traditions alive, including music on ancient rare instruments. When Bradbury Hospice opened in 1992, supported by Lady Patten and the Jockey Club, several fine compassionate doctors sought palliative medicine specialist education through Cardiff and established world-class services, founded on deep humanity and high clinical standards, sensitive to Cantonese culture. When SARS happened, they cared for those dying and helped contain it.

As we have heard, Cantonese religious traditions are broad and varied. Some British, interned by the Japanese invaders during the last war, gained inner strength from St John’s Cathedral church’s ad hoc services, and today its Filipino Christian fellowship supports those in domestic service.

Following handover, Hong Kong’s gentle realignment with mainland China became palpable, while keeping its own distinct identity. Meanwhile, China has developed at an astonishing rate, across all disciplines. To the outsider, China has nothing to fear from Hong Kong—but Hong Kong now fears China, whose more than 1.4 billion people represent almost 19% of the world’s population.

In the early 1990s, Falun Gong, with its Buddhist origins and fundamental tenets of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance, was favoured by the People’s Republic of China. As it became popular, it was proscribed by the atheistic state, and adherents appear to have been systematically persecuted, imprisoned in labour camps without cause, tortured and an unknown number killed. They are prisoners of conscience, along with Uighurs, house Christians, and Tibetans.

Those of us in rich, vibrant societies cannot understand what the perceived threat is to the communist state from people whose philosophy is non-violent and peaceful at all times. Yet now there is extensive evidence that China has been killing its Falun Gong prisoners of conscience to remove organs for commercial human transplantation. I recently met Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, chairman of the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China, whose judgment makes harrowing reading. That evidence-based judgment, delivered in June this year, followed the earlier interim judgment that:

“The Tribunal’s members are certain—unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt—that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practised for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims”.


Is it possible that some doctors could perpetrate such crimes against humanity, even at times taking organs before the person was clinically dead? Shamefully, it seems so. The tribunal’s findings cannot be buried along with the bodies of the victims, so will the Government support the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, to cut off demand from any UK residents who want to participate in this transplant tourism?

How do we come to terms with this huge country, with whom we work well and trade on a daily basis? We welcome Chinese students to our universities and work with China on many major projects. Cardiff Metropolitan University, which I chair, recently welcomed the Deputy Premier of China and his team to our ZER02FIVE Food Industry Centre to help China develop public health training programmes in food handling. In many scientific and medical disciplines, excellent quality work in research and teaching is being undertaken. Collaboration across boundaries should benefit all.

Now, as Hong Kong cries out for open government, we have a moral duty to all those British passport holders. We must not abandon the strength and integrity of these people. We will lose highly skilled Europeans through Brexit, yet Hong Kong British should have open entry to the UK. China has nothing to fear from open ethical practices, but much to fear from abusing human rights. Meanwhile, the British people of Hong Kong, living by our code and legal system, must not be abandoned through wilful blindness.