Gaza: Healthcare System Support

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to support the healthcare system in Gaza.

[Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)]

My Lords, before we start the debate, I remind speakers that they have two minutes and ask them to please stick to that time. We have a lot of speakers to get through and we want to finish the debate on time. Thank you.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, this debate sits comfortably on the back of the debate that we have just heard. Let me immediately set before the House my interests: I am the director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. Our work is global: it addresses human rights abuses, and breaches of humanitarian law and the laws of war around the world. We are currently engaged in work on China, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus, Sudan and now Syria. We do legal training in many other countries too. At the moment, I am personally co-chairing a task force for President Zelensky of Ukraine on the war crime of the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia. Warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court and celebrated by many nations.

I was a member of the legal panel which reviewed the evidence that was to be used, by the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor, to apply for warrants before the court against Hamas and its leadership for the atrocity crimes committed on 7 October—horrifying crimes—and against the Israeli war leaders Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against the laws of war. That related to the failure to enable access to humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people.

The review involved looking at whether thresholds for evidence had been met, but decisions were always made by the prosecutor’s office. The warrants have now been issued by a court of law, not by the prosecutors. It relates to the impact of the absence of humanitarian aid on the well-being and health of the people of Palestine, of Gaza.

I sought this debate because of the grievous humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the near collapse of the healthcare system, with its enormous consequences for suffering people, and because of my concern that Parliament had been too silent on the suffering of the people in Gaza. We are on the brink of a negotiated ceasefire and, thank God, the release of the hostages. I hope and pray that it may be so. But it should not distract us from the dire immediate need for humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people. Those who are conducting this war on behalf of Israel, or who step in to the role of mediators or peacekeepers in the weeks and months to come, have to enable the immediate delivery of substantial aid.

A huge number of hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed and those which remain can barely function. Many medical staff have been killed. There is very little food and water in the region, and no fuel. A hospital cannot function without electricity for incubators, dialysis machines, operating theatres and sterilisation units. Disease is now rampant in the area because of the gross state of sanitation. The infrastructure of Gaza—from its sewers to its water supply pipes, to its schools, mosques and churches—has been destroyed: it is a moonscape. For over a year, no chlorine has been allowed to enter Gaza.

There is little medicine and virtually no medical supplies. Surgeons have had to operate without anaesthesia. The number of people, especially children, who have lost limbs runs into the thousands. To prevent people bleeding to death, ragged remains of limbs have to be sawn off and sutured. Modern doctors are not trained for the sheer horror of doing this kind of operation with patients who are conscious. Many of the international doctors have testified to the fact that they and other healthcare workers working for international organisations are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their experiences.

Israel’s debilitation of Gaza’s healthcare system is justified to the world on the basis that there are Hamas military targets within the hospitals, which may well be true. But what humane war leaders are prepared to kill people in their hospital beds or babies in incubators when there is a Hamas presence in a hospital? I will turn to some of the research that has been done on that in a minute.

Some 62% of all the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. That increases to 80% in northern Gaza. It would be hard to find a single family that has not lost multiple relatives. According to Israel, it has used 70,000 tonnes of bombs, which surpasses the tonnage dropped in Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during the six-year Second World War. The Geneva Convention sought to create new rules of engagement after the horrors of the Second World War, but they seem to count for nothing.

On 10 January, the World Health Organization warned that the Al-Awda hospital, the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza, is so overwhelmed with patients and critically low on essential supplies that care is basically impossible. Damaged roads and insufficient facilitation by the Israeli authorities have made safe access for the WHO impossible. Are we accusing it of making these things up? The UN estimates that, as of 31 December 2024—Christmas time—14,000 patients required medical evacuation abroad in order to meet their needs.

In the emergency debate of the UN Security Council on 3 January, on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the WHO said that Israeli forces had been conducting a systematic dismantling of the health system in northern Gaza. The WHO has verified that 654 attacks have been made on healthcare facilities. The UN human rights office published a report on 31 December claiming that

“Israel’s pattern of deadly attacks on and near hospitals in Gaza … pushed the healthcare system to the brink of total collapse”,

and that

“The conduct of hostilities in Gaza since 7 October has destroyed the healthcare system in Gaza, with predictably devastating consequences for the Palestinian people”.

The horrors go on. On 8 November 2024, the IPC Famine Review Committee stated:

“Famine thresholds may have already been crossed or else will be in the near future”


in northern Gaza. The UN estimates that 60,000 children will require treatment for acute malnutrition in the course of this year.

Before the conflict, some 500 trucks entered Gaza every day. Now, every single person in Gaza requires humanitarian assistance, but in October, 57 trucks a day were allowed to cross into Gaza on average. Of course, it vacillates, but in this House we keep hearing that looting is the problem, with people taking the aid. No mention is made, I have noticed, of the extent to which attacks have been made on the humanitarian aid trucks by settlers from the West Bank. They have torn down humanitarian aid and overturned lorries, with IDF soldiers looking on, inactive.

A report by 29 NGOs, including Save the Children, Oxfam and others, detailed the looting of aid trucks as an ongoing issue, but called the theft of goods

“a consequence of Israel’s targeting of the remaining police forces in Gaza, scarcity of essential goods, lack of routes and closure of most crossing points, and the subsequent desperation of the population amid these dire conditions”.

Many of the those who are looting are young Palestinians who are trying to get food for their families, their parents and other people suffering in the absence of food.

On 10 January, a study was published in the medical journal the Lancet which estimates that the death toll, which people refer to as 47,000, is higher than that: between 55,298 and 78,525. They have split it in the middle, with a best estimate of 64,420.

Finally, I have just read a book by Omar El Akkad called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Each generation looks back in judgment at the moral blind spots of earlier generations, and it will happen on this subject too. One day, we will be ashamed of ourselves for our passivity and hypocrisy concerning what has been happening in Gaza. This silence has to be broken.

Rules-based International Order

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I too pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for introducing this debate and for doing so brilliantly. It is so important that we recognise why the world embarked on a moral course after the Second World War. It was designed to prevent war. It was designed to prevent the escalation of conflicts into war, to prevent the commission of atrocity crimes and acts of gross inhumanity, and to create a better world. It was out of that sense of altruism that we saw the creation of institutions which have lasted until now.

Even though we have a changed world, as the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, has described, those institutions matter. The creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was based on a set of shared values of that time, and the International Bar Association—I declare an interest as director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute—was set up at the same time to bring together lawyers from around the world and all the bar associations of the world to ensure that the law was respected, and that law was part and parcel of that new order.

We followed up with the renewal of the Geneva conventions, seeing that they were not delivering just and fair war. The bombing of Dresden is an example: the new Geneva conventions made after the war said that total bombardments such as that of Dresden amounted to collective punishment of civilian populations and should not happen, and that there had to be rules for the conduct of war. Then there were the subsequent conventions to prevent genocide, to protect refugees and to eliminate discrimination against women—we know so many of them. The idea was that “never again” did not apply to just one community; it applied to all of humanity. We should never again stand by while human beings were subjected to terrible crimes.

For over 70 years, the memory of that war seared the minds of my parents’ generation until they died, and indeed of my generation because we were the children of that. We knew the stories of our parents fighting in the war and enduring the bombings of their homes. My mother lost her home and was left with small children while my father was in the Army abroad. Those experiences created empathy for those who suffered around the world, and that was why having a rules-based order mattered so much.

The noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, tells us that the world has changed, and that is true. We have seen a difference in the position of Russia evolving into a criminal mafia-run state. China is authoritarian still but wants to be a market player. Both of those are on the Security Council and blocking many of the things that that one would want to see being done. So it is true that there needs to be change in some of those institutions, but what does not need to change is the commitment to justice and peace.

There has to be accountability, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas said, if there is to be justice. That means there has to be law. There have to be courts and prosecutions. In the same way that domestically we need to have courts in order to resolve disputes and deal with crime that affects our communities, there have to be international courts to deal with the ways in which states behave towards each other, regulating relationships internally and domestically as well as externally and internationally.

All this has been documented in other speeches, but we somehow did not expect democracies to be dismissive of the rules. However, we are now seeing democracies being created where there are populist nationalist Governments or isolationist Governments who are interested only in their own sovereignty. After the war, there was a recognition that a certain amount of pooling of sovereignty was essential if we wanted to make a better world and we needed to have international law; law has to apply. However, the institutions that maintain democracy are under attack because we have new kinds of Governments, and I am afraid that many of them do not believe in the importance of law. We have seen in Hungary the capture of the judiciary, for example; while in the United States we are seeing something similar, where the judiciary is supposed to deliver what the President or Government of the day want. The independence of the judiciary has been abandoned.

There are attacks on the media, or appropriation of the media so that it is owned by friends of the Government, which means that corruption and crimes by the state are not exposed. Then there is the whole business of the dismissal of civil servants who are fulfilling their independent status. We are denuding democracies of the checks and balances that are essential to just societies.

I reiterate what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, about the importance of multilateralism and partnerships in our world. That is the only way in which we can have a world that will create peace and justice. However, I would say that it is the economic model of neoliberalism that has allowed money, not our common humanity, to become the supreme value.

Markets, as we know, know no morality; they are amoral. It is we who have to inject morality into markets, but then we hear from someone such as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, about market fundamentalism being the name of the game today. What that has done is create huge gaps between the rich and the poor. It has created a whole cadre of billionaires in our world, so rich that they can buy government—or whatever they want—and now running the technologies which are corrupting our democracies.

The whole business of that combination of neoliberal economics—low-tax economies, getting rid of welfare, every man for himself—is about deregulation. That is what the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, was talking about: deregulation is the name of the new order being created and we have to resist it. That is why it is so important that our Government are standing by the rule of law and the role of international courts.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for initiating the debate. Yesterday, I met her in the lift. She said, “I’d like to thank you for your contribution tomorrow”. I said, “Hang on; wait till you’ve heard it and then you can decide”.

I have spent most of my life in some part of foreign policy. I was in the European Parliament for 25 years. I spent five years in the Council of Europe and 15 doing odd jobs for the European Commission. As such, I have seen quite a lot of the world—some 90 countries in all, some of them more times than I would have liked.

I start by giving an example from the Council of Europe. One of the problems with the international order is that it sometimes gets beyond itself. For three years, I was the chair of the Council of Europe committee for the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Of course, everybody says, “Oh, Russia never carried out any decisions”. That is wrong. The worst offender was Italy and the second worst was Turkey. The Russians were not too bad at carrying out decisions of the court that had no real political consequences. Beyond that, they were not very good at all.

I was on that committee when we debated the court’s decision to enforce prisoners’ votes in Britain, which David Cameron—now the noble Lord, Lord Cameron—said made him sick. I did quite a bit of work on this. One of the things I discovered was that most of the judges who had voted that Britain should give votes to prisoners came from countries that gave no rights to prisoners at all. Secondly, many of those judges did not understand the English prison system. In particular, they did not understand the difference between a remanded and a convicted prisoner. Thirdly, when it came down to it, they were open to negotiation. Thanks to the great skill of David Lidington, we managed to solve the case, get the judgment amended and accepted so that, once again, Britain was a country with no outstanding judgments. I mention this because there has been a lot of mission creep in international jurisdiction, which I do not think has done international law a tremendous amount of good.

The Court of Justice of the European Union and the WTO are unique in being courts committed to a very central, tightly drawn range of circumstances, but some of the other courts—including the International Criminal Court—have a tendency to go well beyond where it is sensible for them to go. I see that some noble Lords object to that. To issue an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu is downright foolish, because it will not be implemented. It undermines the authority of the court. People look at it and say, “What a bunch of jokers. Surely, they don’t expect Netanyahu to get off the plane in London and be banged up by the British coppers”.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord know that, when a warrant was issued for Kenyatta, he got on a plane, went to The Hague, submitted himself to the court and said, “I’m here to answer it. I have a defence to this”? It gave him permission to return to his country and to continue to lead it before there were eventually hearings. Why does Mr Netanyahu not do that? You have to remember that the warrant is in relation not to his conduct of the war but his refusal to allow humanitarian aid into the country to feed the population.

Israel-Gaza Conflict: Arrest Warrants

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

On both questions, I am afraid that I disagree with the noble Lord. That is not how we view the ICC. We respect the ICC and our obligations as a signatory to it. As for the decisions on export licences, those were made in compliance with UK law.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that there is a misunderstanding by the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, if he thinks that this is a matter concerning proportionality with regard to self-defence? Warrants have been issued very specifically not in relation to disproportionate use of self-defence. They have been issued on the basis of the refusal to allow humanitarian aid to reach the civilian population of Gaza. That was the basis for the warrants being issued: the starvation that follows from that and the impact in particular on young children’s development and survival possibilities.

I want to ask a supplementary question. It is very important that people in this House know that the International Criminal Court is not indicting Israel. It is indicting two of its leaders who have conducted this war. Normally the principle of complementarity would have meant that we would respect the courts of Israel to investigate and deal with the matter. That was blocked by Prime Minister Netanyahu. Do the Government agree that because that avenue of complementarity was not available, after the opportunity had been given for an inquiry or an investigation by the Israeli authorities, warrants were issued for that reason? Does the Minister agree that it is about the people of Palestine being deprived of humanitarian aid?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My noble friend is correct in that the warrants are for war crimes of starvation, intentional attacks on civilians and other inhumane acts. I point out to noble Lords that the indictment is not a finding of guilt. It is the start of a process. There would theoretically be a court process that would investigate all the alleged crimes.

China: Human Rights and Sanctions

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

We will continue to lead on this issue where we can in international fora. I am grateful for what the noble Lord said, and we share his concerns on this. But, to reiterate, the Foreign Secretary raised Xinjiang and the Uighur people in China last week, and he will continue to do so because our concerns have not changed since the change of Government. He will continue to raise those issues whenever and wherever he can.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

I will ask the Minister about the situation for parliamentarians in this country who were sanctioned because of raising what was happening to the Uighur community in Xinjiang province. Two Members of this House—myself and the noble Lord, Lord Alton—and five Members of the House of Commons were sanctioned. I understand that that was not raised in the Foreign Secretary’s meeting with the leadership in China. Preserving our right to raise human rights issues, without feeling that there will be consequences for doing so, should concern this House.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I completely agree with my noble friend, as does the Foreign Secretary. These issues are raised. The sanctions against parliamentarians for things they have said are completely unwarranted and unacceptable. The Foreign Secretary met with Speaker Hoyle before his trip to China to reiterate that this was a concern to him. It is a concern to the Foreign Secretary and to all of us in the Government. It is inappropriate that parliamentarians in this and the other House should be sanctioned in this way, and we will consistently raise this with China.

Genocide (Prevention and Response) Bill [HL]

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 17th May 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

That the Bill do now pass.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like the opportunity, with the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, to speak briefly to the purpose of this Bill and the stage we have now reached. Noble Lords will remember that the Bill came into being because of the horrifying global events we have all witnessed over recent years. The levels of violence and degradation are not new, but we thought that the experience of the Holocaust had taught the world lessons that might have enabled early intervention, possible diversion and maybe even prevention.

Genocides do not come from nowhere. They are invariably preceded by terrible atrocity crimes, and even before that there is a long trajectory. The whole point of this Bill is that, in retrospect, we should be responding to early displays of hostility, land grabs and the many different ways in which there are red flags as to trouble ahead. The Holocaust did not start with concentration camps. It started with evictions, sackings, trumped-up prosecutions, assaults by extremist thugs, humiliations and so on—for example, the whole business of cleaning streets with toothbrushes.

The events which led to this Bill were the horrors of what happened to the Yazidis under ISIS: the enslavement of so many women; the slaughtering of men and boys. Similar horrible atrocities happened to the Rohingya, with killings and rapes in Myanmar. There is also the case of the Uighurs in China. There are the horrors of what happened, and is still happening, in Sudan in Darfur. We hear, of course, the language of genocide being discussed by Ukrainians about their current experience, and in the Middle East by both sides who perceive existential threat.

The Bill is designed to strengthen a very small atrocity unit created 18 months ago in the Foreign Office. It consists of three people, working on identifying and working around atrocity crimes. We need to strengthen this work going forward, and that is the purpose of the Bill.

The Bill has five key elements. First, it establishes that we monitor closely, as the Elie Wiesel Act does in the United States of America, the red flags of potential genocides. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, promoted that. Secondly, it establishes that a Commons Minister will respond to genocide prevention issues, have that as part of their remit and be directly responsible and accountable in Parliament. Thirdly, it establishes training for people entering the Foreign Office—good, extensive training that will continue at different stages of people’s careers, particularly in respect of the hotspots where such things might happen. Fourthly, it establishes that that Minister will report regularly to Parliament. Fifthly, it establishes a small fund to assist particular victims. That would not deal with this issue to a large extent, but it would, for example, help some of the women who fled enslavement and were unable to return to their homes in northern Iraq to re-establish their lives elsewhere.

That is the nature of this Bill. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who met with me, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and another colleague. The Minister gave a very positive response to the Bill. It is very important in the next months and years that we have a much more effective team working on this, specifically within the Foreign Office. I look forward to hearing from the Minister.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the comments of my noble friend and thank everyone who has engaged on this. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, said at Second Reading that many elements of the Bill were commendable and aligned with the Government’s own activities. I hope that, following the meeting my noble friend had with others, the noble Lord will also meet with me to look at how we can progress these things strongly. I welcome the comments and what the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, has said.

Gaza: Humanitarian Situation

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

I assure my noble friend that, together with my noble friend the Foreign Secretary—whom my noble friend also knows very well—I will leave no stone unturned with vigour, rigour and passion to ensure that this happens. I speak for all noble Lords of whatever perspective. We want to ensure that we do our utmost to save the life of every single innocent civilian. We were all rightly seized with the shocking nature of what happened in Israel. Right now, we are focused on getting more aid in. This is the message that is being delivered, notwithstanding the awful nature of the Iranian attack. It is important that we look at that in the full mix of things and not lose sight of the humanitarian issue. We want to avert famine at all costs.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I listened carefully to the Minister’s reference to the terrible event of 1 April when the humanitarian aid workers from World Central Kitchen were targeted by drones and killed. I know that an investigation by the IDF is taking place. I have also read that Australia is going to conduct an investigation because one of those killed was Australian. Three of those killed were British citizens: a man of 57, another of 47 and a young man in his 30s. They were all hugely experienced humanitarian aid workers. It is shocking to see that the loss of so many people working in this field is not getting the coverage it deserves. Are any steps being taken here in Britain to investigate this matter with the great military and legal expertise that we could apply? I understand that Poland is now considering having an inquiry for the Polish citizen who was killed. Should there not be unification and collaboration between the nations which have lost humanitarian aid workers in this series of strikes on their convoy? Should there not be a joint investigation?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

I assure the noble Baroness that the WCK aid workers only intensified our concerns and momentum in addressing the humanitarian situation, particularly where aid workers in Gaza are putting themselves at risk. More than 200 aid workers have now been killed in this conflict. We need to ensure their protection. The IDF has completed its initial inquiry. There have been some consequences for those who were involved in the strike. As my noble friend is doing again today, we are not just reviewing it, we are asking for it to be followed up with a full, independent report on what happened. The noble Baroness has put forward a practical suggestion, which I will certainly take back. Co-ordination is good. Perhaps we can discuss this outside the Chamber to see how it can be progressed.

Russia: War Crimes in Ukraine

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

I can assure the noble Baroness. On a personal anecdote, the noble Baroness talks about Russians. Our fight is not with the Russian people. I know of a child who is at my son’s school whose mother is half-Russian and half-Spanish, and he is not going back to Russia to see his grandparents because of the fear of what consequences may face a young child who has just started off in life.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not think that the Labour Benches have yet had a chance, so if I may.

As we are talking about war criminals and crimes committed by the Russians, there is a matter of concern that the International Criminal Court Act 2001 confines prosecutions of war criminals coming into this country to people who are nationals or who have residency here. I wonder whether we are making any progress on amending that legislation so that we can prosecute people who come through here, often coming to look at schools or universities for their children or to shop at Harrods. Can we do something about providing the ability to arrest those people?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness will be aware that we work very closely with international agencies, most notably with the ICC on the warrants that have been issued against key Russians, including the President of Russia. Of course those would apply. I know the noble Baroness has raised this issue with me directly as well, and I think that we need to look at what mechanisms can be applied but ultimately—as we have heard from the Cross Benches as well—those responsible for these abhorrent crimes should be held accountable.

Genocide (Prevention and Response) Bill [HL]

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd March 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to propose, for your Lordships’ consideration, a statutory mandate for the prevention of and response to genocide and atrocity crimes. Instances of mass atrocity violence—war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and ethnic cleansing—are not just rising but are spiralling around the world.

I am the director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, and I have spent time with, and campaigned alongside, survivors of atrocity violence, from Yazidi women in Syria and the Uighur communities in exile from China, to the women and human rights defenders of Afghanistan, and many others. Their stories are a glaring testament to the collective failure to stand resolute in the face of atrocity crimes and hold accountable those who continue to perpetrate this kind of identity-based violence.

I have been helped in all my work by a wonderful team at the International Bar Association’s institute, particularly by Dr Ewelina Ochab, who helped in the drafting of this Bill. I have also been assisted by another great group of people, led by Dr Kate Ferguson, who runs an operation called Protection Approaches, which is concerned with foreign affairs.

Of today’s major and emerging foreign policy crises, the vast majority—from Ukraine, Sudan, Syria, Israel and Palestine to Myanmar and Xinjiang—are driven by violent targeting of civilian groups based on their identities. If left unchecked, the global propellants of prejudice and inequality, climate collapse, the retreat from liberal democracy, and the great changes in technology, as we see in social media and so on, mean that identity-based mass atrocity crimes will multiply over the next decade. Of that I am sure. We are already seeing it happening.

At the same time, growing disregard for international law, for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and our collective responsibilities to prevent and protect, has ushered in an age of impunity. We have failed, time and again, in the face of these grave crimes, and as a consequence our world—indeed, our nation—is less safe and becoming less so. Impunity begets impunity.

Regrettably, these crimes have deep consequences. Perpetrators commit genocide and crimes against humanity because they work; they fulfil the dreadful political objectives of their architects. It is not a nice fact, but it is a true one. It is past time that we, and our Government, accept it. For too long, the reluctance to do so has created a strategic and moral deficit in government policy.

This Bill would move towards filling that gap. Anchored by a statutory mandate and, importantly, bolstered by political leadership and strategic vision, properly prioritising atrocity prevention could see the UK lead the world on preventing violence and protecting civilians. It would re-energise commitments to international humanitarian law and rehabilitate Britain’s battered reputation on the global stage, which has happened as a result of our pulling away from our international obligations.

It is commonly said that armed conflicts are a precursor to the commission of mass atrocity crimes, but in fact it is not always that way round. Indeed, during the many human rights crises of the modern age, mass atrocities often came first and caused armed conflict to break out. For example, mass atrocities drove armed conflict in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and failures to adequately respond to mass atrocities against the Rohingya in Myanmar in 2017 emboldened the Tatmadaw, contributing to their seizure of power in February 2021 and the ensuing civil war. The current conflict between Hamas and Israel follows decades of terrible conduct, by both the IDF and Hamas, before, during and after 7 October. We are now seeing the consequence of that in the current crisis in Gaza.

Members of this House and the other place have stood together in outrage, time and again, and I see those of your Lordships who have often supported those of us who have sought to put amendments into legislation. There has been a strong sense of outrage, but it is not sufficient. Outrage does not help to protect innocent civilians from deliberate attack, arbitrary detention, summary execution, sexual violence and torture, or forced starvation.

This Bill seeks to address this fact head on and focuses on what can be done. In recent years, the Government have made welcome progress, recognising mass atrocity prevention as a new foreign policy priority. That started in 2021, and I pay tribute to the Government for doing that. Following the much-needed inquiry by the International Development Committee on this very issue, a mass atrocity prevention hub was created in Whitehall, tasked with co-ordinating the UK’s approach to these crimes. Here I pause to pay tribute to organisations such as Protection Approaches and the UK atrocity prevention working group, and indeed the institute which I have the fortune of directing, all of which have worked on making changes. Despite the steps forward, it is difficult to see their impact in the inconsistent and insufficient policy responses of government to widespread, systemic and systematic violations.

This Bill’s first purpose would provide a statutory basis to elevate and leverage the important work of the mass atrocity prevention hub. It also includes the monitoring of the steps that take people, and Governments, on a trajectory towards genocide. The hub is forecasting global atrocity risks and making country- specific risk assessments, along with the development of early-warning indicators and policy-making efforts. All of that is good, but it is not being adequately supported, so we press for the changes of the Bill.

The second provision of the Bill addresses and seeks to enshrine the need for senior political leadership and ownership of the UK’s moral and legal obligations to prevent and protect. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, is in his place, and he holds ministerial responsibility for UK atrocity prevention. I know he shares my deep concerns about these matters, but I would welcome his thoughts as to what can be done to repair our damaged reputation, as a state that has strayed from the bounds of international law in recent months under this Government.

Thirdly, the Bill addresses the urgent need to support and train embassies and country teams on the dynamics and warning signs of modern atrocities, and the trajectory towards genocide in some cases. The Government have already committed to doing this, but are yet to deliver on it. UK country teams in fragile or violent states have to be properly resourced to embed atrocity prevention thinking and strategy within their policy and programming.

The Bill is ambitious. I make no pretence about the fact that we want to see a growth in accountability for upholding and delivering on this mandate. As your Lordships will see, there is a section in the Bill which requires a Minister to lay an annual report before Parliament. Such a report would enable proper scrutiny of the United Kingdom’s contributions to prevent, protect and punish, and allow us all to advise on their development.

One of the final provisions in the Bill seeks to establish a fund with ring-fenced budget lines that guarantee consistent resourcing for mass atrocity early-warning systems, strategic policy-making and effective implementation.

This is not an expensive set of changes, but I urge them on the Government. The hub that exists is full of really good people doing good work, but it needs to be strengthened. We need proper leadership from politicians and from the Secretary of State. We want to see some real building on this, in the way that has taken place within the State Department in the United States on atrocity crimes and genocide prevention.

It is evident that any meaningful development of a strategic approach to preventing and responding to mass atrocities must bring together senior representatives of government departments—No. 10 itself, the intelligence agencies and multilateral representatives, from the UN to NATO. Atrocity prevention has been a core national security interest for the United States since 2011, supported by a clear atrocity prevention strategy launched in 2022. I knew and was a huge admirer of Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, who was very much at the heart of persuading the American State Department to take these steps and to create a hub that was about genocide prevention and atrocity crime prevention.

I hope that there will be support in government for this Bill. I know that the hub exists, but we need to strengthen it and put it on a statutory footing. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for such a comprehensive response to the Bill and for being generally supportive to it. I know that, when it comes to Private Members’ Bills, there is a reticence about wholehearted support, but I feel that he has dealt with so many of the issues that are of concern here. Again, I pay tribute to the way in which the Minister has such a complete and deep understanding of these issues. He is a great champion of human rights and his command of his brief is exemplary. Our shadow Foreign Minister does a pretty good job as well, in that he too is so knowledgeable about all these issues, and I pay tribute to my noble friend for all that he does and advances in relation to human rights.

I am always in awe of this House when it comes to discussions on these issues of genocide, atrocity crimes and human rights globally. There are so many voices of people with such great and deep experience; I always come away having learned things. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, whose many years of experience enrich this House in what he can contribute. My dear friend the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is the voice of a great conscience in this House about the horrors that take place in our world. His advocacy for steps to be taken in relation to genocide have been without comparison.

All the people who have spoken today, including the noble Lords, Lord Polak and Lord Bourne, are those whose experience—here and in other debates, too—has always left me with a strong sense that, by coming together, we can make a difference. We could reclaim our position as the nation that has the loudest and clearest voice when it comes to the rule of law and respect for human rights. I want that to be reclaimed, as we have gone through a rather low period recently with regard to our commitment to international law. This is really important. Britain is respected around the world and, with leadership, we can make an enormous difference.

I felt the general sense about the Bill was that putting this on a statutory footing has support. I think it would have support in our political parties, so I am going to press on with it because it is so important. One thing that was mentioned repeatedly was that whole business of the logjam that there was about genocide—of always saying that it is a matter for courts and not for Parliaments to decide whether a genocide is happening. One of the refrains which people must become tired with is that of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and myself in saying that it is not about waiting until a genocide happens; it is about what has to be done to prevent genocide, which is so embedded in the genocide convention.

The noble Lord, Lord Polak, described so well, as did the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, the way in which atrocity crimes start with lesser horrors and then rise in the significance and then the gravity of what takes place. That takes us along the road of atrocity crime on a trajectory that goes towards genocide, and a full understanding of that within our embassies and those who assess our security internationally is so important.

It was great to see a hub on atrocity crimes created within the Foreign Office, and they are wonderful people, but it is not properly resourced and it is beleaguered in the efforts it has to make. I know there is great pride in the standards of our diplomats, but it is not enough for us to say that every diplomat has his eye on this ball; there are too many other things to consider. I reinforce what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Collins: that because everyone has responsibility for this, sometimes nobody has responsibility for it. That is why it is so important that the hub is looking; not only should it deal with atrocity crimes but genocide should be named on it as part of its remit.

I want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, because I see that she is at the Bar. She has been one of my heroines in her great advocacy for human rights over many years, and having her participate in the debate today was so important to me.

Members on all Benches, including the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, were in support of this Bill. I know that a Bill will follow from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, where he will seek to create a way in which it could be a court of law that helps us decide whether a genocide is in the offing and for it to be evidentially based.

I am grateful to the Minister for all that he has said about the things that can be taken out of the Bill. I hope that he might at some point be able to persuade his colleagues in the Foreign Office that it would be an advantage to have this legislation and that it would be strengthened by having the hub and this work placed on a statutory basis. I was very interested in his acceptance of many of the suggestions made in the Bill, and I hope to take up his invitation to go and see him.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Foreign Affairs

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, as others have mentioned, it is two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Soon after the war started, I was appointed to a legal task force to advise on war crimes. My area of work is related largely to crimes concerning women and children. I am now working with President Zelensky’s office on the return of children who have been abducted and taken from Ukraine by Russia.

I cannot emphasise enough just how indebted the Ukrainian leadership feels to Britain for the way in which we have been at the forefront of supporting Ukraine. From my work on this task force, it has become clear that there are areas of law where we could make some beneficial changes. For example, what would the authorities do if a Russian general who had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine showed up at a London airport? We asked whether he would be arrested and put on trial. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Of course, we recognise the principle of universal jurisdiction and have interpreted it into British law. However, that allows us and our courts to put on trial people for only a handful of offences—genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity—the kinds of offences that shock the consciousness and the conscience of humankind, no matter where they occur.

The problem is that our law confines this to citizens and residents of the United Kingdom. The only people who can be prosecuted are those with this status. Interestingly, the United States’ law was formed in exactly the same way but, last year, it amended its legislation. Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, very much supported by the State Department, changed it so that presence was enough. The Americans do not have the problem of not being able to arrest Russian generals or Iranian mullahs who are currently out of our reach. This is a piece of low-hanging fruit.

I take up what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, in that I am very happy to see the Foreign Secretary in his role. I know that many of us involved in international issues have been impressed by his willingness to depart from some of the normal policy constraints, so I congratulate him on that. He has a window of opportunity—who knows what will happen later in the year? I suggest that this is a piece of low-hanging fruit, and he could change the law through the Criminal Justice Bill that is coming through Parliament.

The other area of law that I would like us to look at is our state immunity law, which I will discuss very briefly. There is a growing feeling—it has been expressed by the President of the European Commission—that we should consider using the frozen Russian assets that we have. We ourselves have £20 billion worth of Russian assets in our banks. They should be used to assist in the buying of military supplies for Ukraine. The way to do that would be to liquidate them. It would mean some legal change, but, under the doctrine of collective countermeasures, it would be permissible because we are suffering economic consequences, as a nation, as a result of the war. I am not suggesting that we go off on a tangent on our own. I am sure that the Foreign Secretary, with his great skills as a politician, great charm and ambassadorial skills, could get together with the rest of Europe and make an agreement that it is done collectively, as the risks are diminished when it is done collectively.

I turn to the other matters that I want to raise with the Foreign Secretary as low-hanging fruit. I would like to see the strengthening of the atrocity crimes unit in the Foreign Office, because it needs greater resources, and it should monitor indicators of genocide. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, and I argue for that in relation to the issues to which we often drawn this House’s attention, including the position of the Uighurs. The unit should look at whether there is a trajectory towards genocide, which should be monitored in a sophisticated way, and resources are needed for that.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad—I am a great fan of his—for mentioning Vladimir Kara-Murza, an extraordinary person who is currently in prison in Russia. He has, undoubtedly, twice been poisoned by the state and is now facing a long sentence, just like Navalny. He is a British citizen, and I hope that pressure can be brought to bear on Russia to release him and let him return to Britain. I suspect that that means having to be involved in an exchange of prisoners. We do not have a Russian to exchange, but Germany does, and I think that collaboration with Germany may make it possible for that kind of exchange to take place. I know that that is normally resisted by the Foreign Office, but we should consider doing it for this prisoner at this moment in time, given what happened to Navalny.

My last message to the Foreign Secretary is this. He is dealing with the whole issue of the Middle East, and I know how difficult that is. We always talk about the importance of peacemaking. Here I take up what the most reverend Primate mentioned: peacemaking is vital, but we must have women at the tables, and I am worried that women will not be at the tables in the Middle East. With his great advocacy skills, please will the Foreign Secretary ensure that we have women at the tables? That is what we want to see.

Ukraine

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Friday 26th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, of which I am the director, has been working with Ukraine on war crimes. I co-chair the taskforce for the return of the children who have been taken from Ukraine to Russia. The arbitrary removal of the children of a nation is a war crime: it is a legal outrage and is morally reprehensible.

Over the last two years, Russian officials and military have transferred thousands of children out of Ukraine and to the huge land mass that is Russia. Some have been placed in institutions in far-flung regions, and others with foster families; some of the very young have been put up for adoption. The impact on a population at war is immeasurable. Russia’s claim that the children were being taken out of the theatre of war for their own well-being does not bear examination. The warrants issued by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court were based on evidence and a prima facie case of crimes being committed contrary to the Rome Statute and the Geneva Convention.

The question of how many children have been removed is debated. Some deportations involved emptying institutions and orphanages of their inhabitant children and transporting them across the border; others involved removing children from hospitals where they were being treated after bombings; and others involved taking children from the occupied territories, with parental consent, to so-called summer schools, but then never returning them. Ukraine puts the figure at 19,546—I say it as precisely as that because I was with the delegation at Davos only a week or so ago. Up to February last year, the Yale University Conflict Observatory, using open-source materials, put the figure at 7,000. However, I took evidence from it just before Christmas, and it now says that the figure is double that; it anticipates that the figure will increase as it works through the open-source material. It is going to be close to what the Ukrainians say.

The Yale observatory research also shows that 2,442 disabled children from Russian-occupied Ukraine have been transferred to facilities in Belarus, supposedly for medical treatment. There have been attempts to recover some of these children. The Pope got one back, and Qatar managed to get a handful here and there. However, the majority of those who have returned—just over 500—were located by their own families or by Ukrainian NGOs that boldly travelled into the lion’s den, or they were adolescent teenagers who ran away to get back home.

You have to ask the question, why? What is the real purpose of taking children from their homeland? Young people who have managed to return home give accounts of a determined policy of re-education, with daily classes to show that their identity is really Russian and that Ukraine is a Russian region, not a genuine nation. The lessons are all conducted in Russian; it is basically indoctrination about these children’s history. The effect is clear: it is subversion to sap political will and undermine resolve, and it is another way of destroying identity. The Ukrainian population is demoralised by the capture of their young. It eats at the hearts of families and communities.

You may ask me, what is the legal position? All I can say is that there is no shortage of law. There is no single treaty to protect children in conflict, but the Geneva conventions, international humanitarian law, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the genocide convention, other human rights law instruments, the Rome statute and international criminal law all state clearly that children affected by armed conflict are entitled to special respect and protection. There is a clear ban on forcible transfer, deportation and adoption. However, no enforcement mechanisms can work while war is in progress unless steps are taken—as they have been in Gaza—to create a pause in hostilities and humanitarian corridors, having arranged in advance a recognition of certain categories of children and negotiated with entities inside Russia for those children to be returned in the gap created. This will be created only with international pressure.

Too little has been said about this terrible crime. The worst accounts are of children as young as three and four being placed for adoption in Russia. Their chances of ever being recovered at the end of some war are diminishing by the month. The taking of children is a tragedy that demands action by the international community. So I ask the Minister, who I know is deeply committed to these issues: what can the United Kingdom do? The President of Ukraine has created an action plan to Bring the Kids Back, as he entitles it. He has a coalition of nations which Britain has signed up to. Can Britain lead in this, given our status as a nation that is committed to the protection and well-being of children, and to international rules around war?

The task force I am heading is very much involved in negotiating some of this, but we need to engage the global South. We need to have the nations that are remaining neutral and standing on the sidelines for all sorts of reasons. In the Commonwealth, there are many nations taking that position. There is a great deal that can be done of a diplomatic nature to bring on board people who may not want to take a position on the actual war but are still outraged by the taking of children. We need to bring those people on board and Britain’s voice will be vital in doing that. That is what the President’s office seeks. My co-chair is the chef de cabinet, Andriy Yermak. He wants nations to use their connections with other nations to bring them on board in this effort. It must be done now; there is an urgency about it and I hope the Government will take steps.