International Women’s Day and Protecting the Equality of Women in the UK and Internationally

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I first thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, for leading this important debate. I have great affection for her and it has been wonderful to see her becoming such a strong and powerful voice on the government Benches, the other side from me. It shows how we can all come together positively to talk about issues such as the importance of addressing the ways in which women’s lives are still undermined by misogyny and discrimination and the ways in which women around the world suffer.

I am a lawyer and much of my work is now in the international field. I could have easily made this speech about my work as I see it, day in, day out, on genocide, sexual crimes in conflict and empowering women as parliamentarians. I chair a group of parliamentarians from the MENA region under the Helsinki forum, which helps to address the legislation they would like in their own countries and how they could emulate what happens in other jurisdictions. But today I am going to speak about the domestic situation. I want to ask all in this Room when the last time was that you consciously altered your behaviour, when you were at the bus stop or walking home. A man might struggle to answer that question, but a woman will probably have an example from this week, last week or the week before—or even from going home late last night.

The business of self-safeguarding is built into a woman’s life from an early age. We listen to footsteps. We avoid the shadows. We carry our keys in our hands. We avoid roads that are ill-lit or tree-lined. When I leave this House and go home late at night, I walk up the middle of my road that leads to my house from the Tube station, because I do not want to be close to the dark bushes and shadows on the pavement. As children, girls as young as eight or nine are warned to take care, not to be alone when they are coming back from the park or school, to stay with their friends and to keep to strict timetables. By internalising those messages from our parents, women learn that, unfortunately, there are bad men out there. We hear the message about what they might do to us, which is about sexual violation and the possibility of rape. It is about impregnation. Little girls learn that stuff, and it stays with you for the rest of your life. The lessons that women learn, as they receive that care from their parents and caretakers, is that, if they do not keep to those steps, somehow or other, it will be their fault if something goes wrong. Again, the idea of shame and blame is internalised when women are ill-treated, abused, assaulted or worse. Blame often centres on the victim.

A year ago now, the Scottish Government asked me to form an independent working group to decide whether adding sex to existing hate crime legislation would be an effective way to protect women or whether there should be a stand-alone remedy to deal with misogyny. I was clear from the outset that we do not criminalise thought; it is very important people realise this. There is talk of misogyny being a crime but, fortunately, it cannot be. I hope we hold true to that, because it is the conduct that flows from hate that we address. Modes of thinking, and what happens in that forum internum between our ears, is very precious and has to be protected. Freedom of thought is protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in our human rights conventions and laws. Freedom of thought is protected because that is where our ideas, creativity, imagination and ability to deal with the world’s challenges come from. It has to be protected, but we do not have to protect the ills that come from hatred, which are also harboured in that space. As I am making clear, it is the conduct that flows from hate that we have to address.

Soon after we embarked on our task, Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa were brutally murdered and women up and down the country demanded that something be done. Women were correctly making the link, which I emphasise today, between serious misogynistic crimes such as rape, domestic violence and other serious transgressions that women experience, and the other things they experience which are deemed too low level for police attention. Women were saying that, if you do not deal with the men who rub themselves up against people on the Tube or flash at women in public places —and at little girls; they flash at children from school—or the other ways women experience abuse, whether verbal abuse or touching, groping and so on, unfortunately you then create a normalisation which makes it much more difficult to address the more serious stuff. The crushing weight of those experiences for women cannot be dismissed as too trivial to engage the law.

When I started my legal career, men convicted of rape could often walk out of court with a suspended sentence. Domestic violence was described as six of one and half a dozen of the other. Sexual harassment was laughed at. I have spent a lot of my energy arguing for reform of gender-based law, because it was created from a male perspective—not with any conspiracy in mind, but that was the nature of things. A lot has happened, but not enough has changed. These issues are now being treated much more seriously at policy level, but we are still having difficulty with the outcomes. Outcomes are still poor, and you have to ask why. A lot has changed, but the underlying attitudes within the criminal justice system and society as a whole make it very difficult to secure justice for women.

The questions that my working group addressed in the past year came about by examining the testimony of many women and organisations about the verbal insults, denigration, humiliation, gropings, undermining or patronising behaviour, online trolling and sexual objectification they experience. I have to tell you that, cumulatively, it is a horror story. There is no male experience that is comparable—there really is not. I know young men experience violence on the streets, and so forth, but it is very different. Men do not come out of the pub saying, “Text me when you get home, Charlie”, because getting home might pose a serious problem. But women do it all the time; for young women, this is daily practice. As a result, we have proposed that a new misogyny and criminal justice Act for Scotland should be created that will include a new statutory misogyny aggravation. That is something that we in this House voted for but, unfortunately, it was rejected when it went to the other place.

We really should be looking seriously at what women experience. What we have advocated is law for women, challenging the default position that all law is neutral, because that is not working. Women are being targeted by certain kinds of behaviour, and you need targeted law to deal with it. The default position is that, for example, men can be raped and suffer domestic violence too. However, men are not experiencing stuff such as standing at a bus stop where, if a man comes up and starts engaging with you and you ignore him, you start receiving the foulest torrents of abuse. Men just have no idea what women put up with, including talk of the most salacious and disgusting kind and language that would make your hair curl.

I believe that the internet has created a disinhibition, so that people can say things anonymously. But it is now travelling off the internet and out of social media onto the streets. Young women are receiving this in playgrounds, student unions, bars and clubs—talk of sexual matters of the most explicit, crude and horrible kind. Then, when women reject it, they face discussion of how unattractive, fat and ugly they are and that they therefore do not deserve any sexual interest. They go home feeling wretched and miserable. Is it any wonder that they then do not feel able to ask for equal pay or promotion at work or that they do not take up positions in public life? Is it any wonder that they do not make a success of themselves in many of the areas where they should? This really has to be addressed.

We have advocated that an offence of stirring up hatred against women should be introduced into law, that public misogynistic harassment should be made a crime, and that the issuing of threats or invoking of rape or disfigurement, online and offline, should be criminalised. I say “invoking” because online algorithms often create pile-ons, so that a woman, who might be a Member of Parliament, a journalist or a campaigner, receives a threat of rape in language that is difficult for the police to deal with, because it says something like, “Somebody should rape you”, or, “You deserve to be raped”. They do not say, “I’m coming after you”, they are saying, “Somebody should rape you”, but the terror created in the hearts of women is still the same, because they know that there are people out there who are likely to take up that sort of invitation. Those women start not to go out as often and do not participate in public events in the way they might.

I do not think that older age groups understand what is going on, and I do not think that men have any idea that this goes on. It is really important to look at the stuff we looked at as we took evidence. I do not do social media, and I am glad that I do not—the poor noble Lord, Lord Farmer, is going to receive a whole lot of communications as a result of his speech today—because I take part in too many things that I know will incite the aggressions of folk out there. All I can say is that, when you are required to do it in gathering evidence, it is a shock to the system to see what women in Parliament, women standing for Parliament, women who are journalists, and women who are campaigners are exposed to. The other day I was with the scientists who took part in the Covid matter. Absolutely horrible abuse and insults were poured over them. I heard that the mother of the child who died of a terrible asthmatic attack, who has been campaigning on reducing pollution levels, has also received abuse online. It is unbelievable that any woman who seems to say anything publicly has this happen to her.

I hope that the UK Government will look at the steps being taken in Scotland. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that it is very nice to hear a paean of praise about women, but we need to bring up our boys better so that they have some of the attributes he gave to women—sensitivity, caring and thinking about the other. I am afraid our boys are now seeing this porn that comes up on their phone willy-nilly and presenting it to girls. They think that intimacy looks like that and that that is how you perform sexually. They are introducing that kind of thinking into their own behaviours.

This is serious stuff. I hope the Westminster Government will at some point follow Scotland’s lead. I hope we will make the necessary change. Most decent men—they are here in this House—do not behave like this and are willing to be our allies in creating a gear-shift, but we need to start looking at the perpetrator and get off this business of examining the women. Let us look at the perpetrators who are doing this and start dealing with these crimes differently.

[Baroness Cox (CB)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for this opportunity to commend many women in dire situations who exhibit inspirational courage, resourcefulness and resilience. I am also grateful for the opportunity to request that our Government provide urgently needed support for some priority areas.

My small NGO, HART—the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust—was founded to provide aid and advocacy for victims of war, conflict, oppression and/or persecution not reached by major aid organisations for political and/or security reasons. We work with local partners, who use the very limited resources we can provide to make transformational changes for their communities. Time allows only two examples of situations where we are privileged to provide such support: Shan Women’s Action Network—SWAN—in Myanmar’s Shan state; and central belt Nigeria, where massacres by Islamist Fulani militants continue unabated. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, for highlighting the very serious situation in South Sudan. We also support partners there. The situation is dire, as the noble Lord has highlighted.

In Burma—I use this name because it is strongly preferred by our in-country partners—in healthcare, there is currently chaos as a result of the military coup and brutal military offensives against civilians.

I have visited Shan state in Burma many times with HART. As we speak today, its people are trapped in protracted conflict, ruthlessly supressed by the military regime. Among the thousands of displaced, 70% are women and children, including pregnant women, teenagers who have just given birth and the elderly. They have fled with minimal possessions. Some have lost their farmland and homes, forced to flee to remote villages or into the jungle, and are suffering from hunger and cold, lacking shelter and medical care.

It is within this context that HART’s inspirational partner, SWAN, continues to operate. SWAN is a female-led organisation dedicated to gender equality and justice. Staff provide life-saving emergency aid, antenatal care, postnatal care and counselling. They also run safe houses for women and girls affected by domestic violence and provide vocational training sessions for practical support in an emergency.

Without organisations such as SWAN, many more female lives would be lost. Yet SWAN receives no support from within Burma and almost no international support, other than from small organisations such as HART.

I also raise another serious issue faced by health workers in many parts of Burma. In a recent Zoom call arranged by the Tropical Health and Education Trust, I was privileged to talk to nurses inside Burma who are desperate for supplies needed to provide healthcare. Many hospitals are now owned by the military, and attacks on civilians have caused many deaths, injuries and massive displacement.

There is an urgent need for aid for healthcare workers who, in spite of personal danger, are striving to provide healthcare to sick and vulnerable people. Many have been arrested, some have been killed and many more are living in dire conditions, working without funding or essential equipment.

I understand and greatly appreciate that the FCDO has been providing some funding, but I also understand that this funding for nurses is going to stop. In reality, it is even more needed as the situation deteriorates and the impact of Covid becomes more serious. I highlight that very serious problem. Any reduction or cessation of UK support for the Burmese nursing profession would create even more massive problems in the provision of healthcare, especially in remote regions. For example, there have been reports of hundreds of thousands of women deprived of care during childbirth which they would have received before the disruption inflicted by the military coup. This has led to a large increase in maternal and infant deaths. Also, effective treatment of most common conditions—for example, dengue and pneumonia—has become almost impossible, leading to great suffering and many more deaths. Therefore, I urge the FCDO to consider, as a matter of urgency, the provision of significant funding for Burmese healthcare professionals and, in particular in this context, nurses.

I also urge implementation of a policy of working with reliable agencies across national borders to reach those in dire need in remote areas who will not receive aid sent to Yangon. For example, in the past DfID, as it was then, provided cross-border life-saving aid to SWAN. DfID also enabled HART to supply life-saving funds to civilians in Chin state suffering from the Mawta famine, caused by the flowering of bamboo, attracting a massive invasion of rats, which devour all food supplies.

I mention those examples to highlight the fact that we have well-established relationships with health professionals in-country and across borders who have demonstrated integrity and professionalism. They are now all desperate for funding to provide life-saving supplies to some of the many thousands of displaced people driven from their homes by the military offensives and living in terrible conditions in remote jungle areas. I therefore make a passionate plea to the Government to provide life-saving cross-border aid to reach such civilians living in dire need. As I said, these people will not receive aid sent to Yangon.

I turn briefly to the middle belt region of Nigeria, where tens of thousands have been killed or wounded in horrific Islamist attacks, and where millions are displaced. Just a few days ago, I returned from a visit to some of the worst affected regions and witnessed the ruins of homes, farmland, food stores, churches and an orphanage—all attacked by Islamist Fulani militia in the past seven months. We heard detailed accounts of children slaughtered, a 98-year-old woman burned alive, and people hacked to death by machetes as they ran from rapid gunfire.

Islamist Fulani militia attacks continue to escalate against predominantly Christian villages in Nigeria’s middle belt. Thousands of killings have occurred since 2009, with countless others suffering life-changing injuries. It is estimated that around 3 million people in the central belt alone have been displaced by the destruction of their homes, insecurity and fear. Many Muslims who refuse to adopt the Islamist ideology of Boko Haram and the Islamist Fulani militia are also killed. According to Christian Solidarity International, at least 615 people were killed in just the first three weeks of this year by Islamist militants. The number has increased greatly since, as the killings continued during our time there.

The perpetration of atrocities also continues. These are a tiny proportion of the examples. A widow called Beatrice, aged 25 and from Plateau state, told us:

“I returned in the morning but everything was burnt. I went to my home and saw my mother and siblings butchered and burnt.”


A young mother called Ruth shared a similar story:

“Fulani militia burnt everything including animals. Hardly anything survived. Ten people were killed … some were burnt, others shot, others macheted.”


Janet, a mother of four children, told me this:

“I found my husband had been killed. I cannot go back to my village. It has been burnt. We are barely managing.”


Although Nigeria represents 2.4% of the world’s population, it contributes to 10% of global deaths for pregnant mothers and has the fourth-highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Its suffering is impossible to fathom.

So, too, is its courage and resilience. I give just one example: during my many visits to central Nigeria, I have been privileged to witness the phenomenal work of Gloria Kwashi, who is married to the equally inspiring Anglican Archbishop Ben Kwashi of Jos. They are both survivors of horrific Islamist violence and torture. However, Gloria’s enormous capacity for resilience and love is shown by her ever-expanding family. In addition to her own children, she and Archbishop Ben have adopted 57 orphans in need of care. She also runs a clinic and established a school for about 400 children, and gets up at 4 o’clock in the morning every day to prepare food for the hundreds of students. It makes me feel very humble.

Yet, like so many others in central Nigeria, she receives no support. Despite the escalating needs in the middle belt region, the United Kingdom does not provide any humanitarian assistance apart from a small interfaith mediation programme. Such a minimal response from the British Government is in no way appropriate to the scale and urgency of the humanitarian and security crises in central Nigeria. HART is responding to desperate requests to help with the provision of education and healthcare by supporting the provision of vehicles that take educational supplies to the displaced people forced to flee to remote areas. It will soon provide similar vehicles to take healthcare to these destitute civilians.

Therefore, while I commend the Government on their expressions of commitment to empower women and girls and prevent violence against them, I urge the Minister no longer to turn a deaf ear to the massive suffering of victims of violence in Burma’s ethnic states and Nigeria’s middle belt. There is an urgent need for an immediate humanitarian response to enable women to receive the aid they need and to maintain the inspirational contributions of the many valiant women who are working to alleviate suffering and promote human rights, freedom, democracy and peace. They are an inspiration and make me feel very humble.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

You are an inspiration too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Hear, hear. First, I apologise to the Committee for my seated comments to my noble friend Lord Young. I want to say something to the noble Lords, Lord Farmer, Lord Young and Lord Clement-Jones, who all meant very well by what they said—and I think we could all agree about the need for careful and respectful debate, and not taking for granted or assuming what people might think or what they might be saying. The only thing that I would say to them is that I have been a feminist all my life. One thing that you learn as a feminist, and as someone who has been active in women’s politics, is that you need to be in control of the battles that you fight. I say to them that it is great that they feel as strongly as they do, and please support me and my feminist friends in any way you can, but actually the fight is ours.

I intend to make a speech that is about breaking the bias and about ending the prejudice and discrimination that women face on a daily basis in 2022. As other noble Lords have said, of course, who could not be absolutely choked up when we heard little Gabriella saying “Mummy” to her mummy? Goodness me, is it not wonderful that that family is reunited? I pay tribute to my honourable friend Tulip Siddiq, the MP for that family. I also wish everybody a happy St Patrick’s Day.

I thank the Minister for getting us this debate because, like other noble Lords, I am sure that she will agree that it deserves to be in the main Chamber; so I will just ask her to put it in the diaries of the Leader of the House and the Chief Whip for next year and mount a campaign—one that we will all join her in—to make sure that we get the debate that we want on the special day on which we want it. I did, however, visit Central England Co-op’s wonderful International Women’s Day debate at the National Memorial Arboretum last week, and spent a very lovely morning there. It was not New York, but it was actually a great event. My job there was to speak about bias in my life and lessons to be learned, so I thought I might mention a few biases that I have known and experienced.

The first example I want to mention involves my late mum, Jean Thornton, the eldest of 11 children in a working-class family in Batley and Spen. I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not aware that my mum was top of her class in her primary school. She was very ill and failed to be able to take her 11-plus exams, and despite the fact that her teachers were really very keen that she should take it, her family did not arrange for her to re-sit it, but they did send her brother to the grammar school the following year and could not afford two sets of uniforms. She felt that missed opportunity literally all her life, which is why I can remember it: I have always known this story about my mum missing that opportunity and suffering from that bias.

Even though she made a great success of her working life and her public life and had seven children of her own, it did make her very ambitious for us, her six daughters. I am the eldest of seven. When the head teacher suggested—and it has to be said that I was definitely a troublesome, campaigning sixth-former—that I might not be university material, and should settle for a teacher-training college, I was not actually sure that he would escape with his life. I did, indeed, head to the LSE.

When I was in my early 30s, in the 1980s, I decided to take a pop at getting selected as a parliamentary candidate in Bradford, when one of our Labour MPs had died. Those of you who have subjected yourself to the ordeal of trying to be selected to fight a parliamentary seat will know that you have to attend a lot of meetings to sell yourself to the members of the local party. However, two of the meetings for this parliamentary selection were held in local working men’s clubs in Bradford, and I, as a woman, could not enter. I had to be signed in and escorted through the club; so while I watched all the other candidates, who were all men, waltz into the selection meeting, I had to wait until the secretary came to sign me in and escort me to the meeting.

At the time, I probably did what most of the women here would have done: I just got on with it. I made the best speech that I could and, needless to say, I did not get selected. It did, however, harden me, and it gave me a campaigning zeal to change the Labour Party selection rules and to ensure that there would be a great pipeline of women ready to stand for election. So in 1997 we saw the 100-plus Labour women, and now more than half of our Parliamentary Labour Party are women.

We have all experienced bias, be it minor but annoying. For example, I am fairly sure that when I came to your Lordships’ House in 1998, Conservative women here in the House did not wear trousers. I do not know if there was a rule or what, but it simply was not done.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

It was the same in the courts.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Yes, it was the same in the courts. In 1998, women Peers had two little toilets that were by the Chamber. The men still had the splendid Victorian ones, but we gained the one just around the corner within a few years.

Then, of course, the bias goes to the downright dangerous and discriminatory. I have an admiration for the organisation Pregnant Then Screwed. This is partly because, when I was pregnant with my first child, I was without doubt the most senior person in the whole co-operative movement to have ever taken maternity leave; I was not that senior, actually. The chair of the committee for which I worked simply thought that I was being awkward and unco-operative by not saying exactly when I would return to work after my baby was born. Today, I would have known to take out a complaint and have them in a tribunal as quick as you like, but I did not know and so just had not as happy a time during my pregnancy as I should have had.

In the medical and health world where I work, there is still a clinical bias whereby medicines and devices are designed for and tested on men. This is changing but, of course, it is potentially dangerous and certainly can be very uncomfortable. The bias, otherwise known as misogynism, in our police, which has been mentioned already, has appalling consequences for both individual women and their treatment. We know about Sarah Everard but, more recently, a young girl was strip-searched at her school, including the removal of her sanitary wear, by two police officers. She was traumatised by her treatment, which took place without her mother or an adult present.

We have the lowest rape convictions for an age, as noble Lords have mentioned. As Dame Vera Baird said, 1.5% of rape cases reach court, meaning that 98% do not. We have long argued for the inclusion of domestic abuse and sexual offences in the definition of “serious violence”. We argued for violence against women and girls to be a strategic policing issue, given the same prominence as terrorism and organised crime. We argued for safeguards to be set out on the extraction of data from victims’ phones. We argued for a lifting of the limit for prosecution of common assault or battery in domestic abuse cases. We argued for a review into spiking, so that we can get to the bottom of this appalling practice. None of these measures were included in the Government’s original Bill. They are all there as a result of the campaigning work of women’s organisations, the Labour Party and, I have to say, the Liberal Democrats and other Members of your Lordships’ House. We have changed the law for women for the better. The Government have been asked some pertinent questions by my noble friend Lady Kennedy about ensuring that misogyny is made a hate crime and publishing a perpetrator strategy at the end of the month, as the Domestic Abuse Act requires. The Government must adopt these measures.

Turning to health, the area in which I work, we need the women’s health strategy to be produced. I am pleased that the Secretary of State has now said that it will be. The UK has been found to have the largest female health gap in the G20 and the 12th-largest globally. Research has shown a gender health gap in the UK where many women receive poorer healthcare than men and are routinely misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed. There is still a great deal of work to do.

I want briefly to turn to the international issues mentioned by several noble Lords. I just want to add my voice and say this: what a short-sighted, counter- productive decision it was to reduce funding for women and girls across the world at every single level. This was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, my noble friend Lady Armstrong—virtually everybody. We need to return the funding for women and girls to its pre-2020 level; this requires the return of the £1.9 billion in programming. We need it now. We cannot afford not to find it.

I want to mention two other issues. One is to do with bias and tone. Both the current Secretary of State for Health and his predecessor have called out my honourable colleague Rosena Allin-Khan at the Dispatch Box because they did not appreciate her tone. That makes me quite angry because when men do that and say to women, “You’re not using the right tone, my dear”, what they are actually saying is, “You shouldn’t be speaking at all. Please speak only with our permission”. I place that on the table but, do not worry, my honourable friend Rosena is absolutely aware what is happening: those men are saying that she should not be speaking.

Finally, the Labour Party is the party of equality. We are the party of the Equal Pay Act, the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equality Act. We understand that our society, our economy and our country are poorer if women cannot play their full part. Women hold the key to a stronger economy. My noble friend Lord Sikka was quite right and I have been asking, all the time I have been in the House, for gender impact assessments. We have been asking for them for many years, so I plead with the Minister to add that to her to-do list.

International Women’s Day is always a bittersweet moment. It celebrates how far we have come, which is a great distance—certainly a great distance in the time I have been in your Lordships’ House—but also notes, with regret, how far we still have to go. It is a chance to recommit ourselves to the struggle for women, the girls of today, and our daughters and granddaughters of tomorrow. Women across the country and the world deserve security, prosperity and respect. We think a Labour Government would give them that but, for as long as we are still on these Benches, we will push the Government to deliver it.

Afghanistan (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I too pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. She is one of the wise women of this House. I welcome the report and express my regret that we are debating it a year after it was produced. It was indeed prescient; if only some of the warnings contained in it had been taken on board.

Only a month after the report was produced, two Supreme Court judges were assassinated in Kabul: Justice Zakia Herawi and Justice Qadria Yasini. We should remember their names. I knew Qadria Yasini; in fact, two of her sons were included in the evacuations conducted by the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, of which I am the director. We took out 103 women judges and prosecutors as well as some others, including a couple of journalists and two Members of Parliament. We took out those boys, then aged 17 and 19, too. They are still sitting in Athens, waiting on the lily pad that was secured as a temporary place for us to land the planes we chartered. Let me tell you, it was never our plan to charter airplanes; that has not been part of my legal practice over the years. However, when judges contacted us, desperate and in mortal danger—let there be no doubt that they were in mortal danger—we felt that we had to do something.

I did not immediately think of chartering planes. I sought to find who was getting people out. In fact, Christians were being evacuated by American evangelical charities. I wanted to know whether some of my women judges could be put in the back of the planes, but of course there was no room at the inn. There were no places on the planes but they did give put us contact with charter companies. This meant that I discovered the great price there was on evacuations, and I had to fundraise the money to get these women prosecutors and judges out.

What is special about the women prosecutors and judges, you may well ask me? Is this about evacuating the great privileged and professional middle classes? These women were educated at law schools in the period after the Taliban were last ousted. Many of them are still comparatively young women by our judges’ standards; we are talking not about Brenda Hale here—the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale—but about women who are still in their 30s and early 40s, with young children. They answered a call which we, of course, wanted them to answer. We wanted to see a different kind of judiciary, which reflected the whole of their society, and encouraged that. They took up the challenge and became judges in courts that were dealing with the narcotics that have troubled the cities in our own countries. They were running the courts that dealt with terrorists who were blowing up our soldiers with home-made bombs. They were dealing with some of the most challenging cases that we wanted to see dealt with properly by those courts.

All the way through the years before the re-arrival of the Taliban in Kabul these women were receiving threats, which arrived at the courts. They have not stopped receiving threats for years. Then in February, nearly a year ago now, two of their most senior women colleagues were assassinated and the terror that ran through their circles was huge. They knew it was a warning. Those women were shot: Zakia through the forehead and Qadria through the heart. The head and the heart—that is what those women brought to their professional practices.

The prosecutors too, who were prosecuting cases of violence against women, trafficking, forced marriage, child marriage and rape, were all on the kill lists of the Taliban as soon as the Taliban were released from prison. Let us be in no doubt as to the threat these women are facing. There are still women making contact with me and telling me of the danger that they face. They are living in basements or have moved to other houses. They move on a regular basis because of their fear; their relatives are also in fear.

What do I say in answer to the Home Office on this? When I asked for visas for some of the people who are still there—young prosecutors who are undoubtedly at the top of the list—I was told: “But you see, there’s a problem. Even if there is proof of this, we can’t give visas to people in Afghanistan because we have no embassy there, so they can’t be measured for biometrics. You can’t get a visa if you can’t be biometrically tested, and we can’t do that because we don’t have an embassy to do it, therefore there are no visas”. Tell me, then, the safe routes for how you get to the United Kingdom.

Then a suggestion was made, and I have learned a lot about how to evacuate people from Afghanistan. I know now about air traffic control and landing rights. I know all about how you manage to get from A to B with security, and about safe houses. So when I say, “We could bring out another planeload of the most desperate of the women, who need help now”, I am told, “Oh no—we can’t do that because we might be sued”. I said: “Who by? Who do you think is going to sue you?” There is the anxiety that there might be risks here and we would not want to have blood on our hands. Let me tell you: we are going to have blood on our hands. I am afraid that the answers I have been given so far have not been very heartening.

I would not have been able to do this without the incredible generosity of many people. I know that some noble Lords donated to the fundraising I conducted. I thank them for the way they helped and encouraged me. Sir Michael Hintze, an Australian philanthropist who has dual nationality and lives and works here in the United Kingdom, took up the lion’s share of paying the costs of some of these flights. I was helped by other people, some of whom do not want their names to be mentioned because they “do a mitzvah”, as Jewish people would say, quietly and without recognition. But that should not be necessary. What happened to states doing these things?

At the end of all this, I want to ask: what are we doing about visas for people to get out? With my little team at the International Bar Association and with Sir Charles Hoare, who is a great humanitarian, I have managed to get resettlement for a number of these women around the world. Australia is taking 20. I phoned up the former President of Ireland, who happened to study at the same time as me, and we got people into Ireland, which has already taken 10. As far as I can count, we have got only nine women judges into the UK so far. Five of them got out in the military evacuation and four have been taken from my group, who have been sitting in Athens in this temporary lily pad. They have been there for five months. I reiterate what others have said: why have we not done better?

I will ask about money. We talked about corruption in aid that was paid into Dubai to people who were supposed to be legitimate Governments. Why do we not talk to Dubai about the amount of money that was hived off and sits in bank accounts in Dubai? Transparency International has documented it. We should freeze some of those assets.

If I secured more funding for another flight, will the Foreign Office and the Home Office help us secure landing rights here in United Kingdom for another plane of perhaps 30 judges, lawyers, prosecutors, journalists and human rights workers fleeing for their lives? If I get 30 of them and their families, will Britain accept them?

Even as we speak, negotiations are taking place in Oslo with the Taliban. Are we talking about the rights of women? Alex Crawford interviewed Abdul Qahar Balkhi on Sky News earlier today, who said that

“we do not threaten women … ever … we have a lot of respect for women”.

I have heard abusers in this country say how much they respect women, but it does not stop the terrible levels of abuse. We know these people abuse and want to silence women. They were busy today in the media saying that it was the military abusing women over the last 20 years. The dishonesty is clear. All I am saying is that the women who made a stand and did a great deal of public service that we and the people of Afghanistan benefited from are still in fear. We have not stood up and done well enough yet. I hope we can do more.

Refugees: Mass Displacement

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, wish to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for introducing this debate with his usual humanity and well-informed compassion. This debate calls for an international response to the shocking fact that, globally, 84 million people are displaced. It is a misery index of record proportions. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and others documented the basis and root causes of so many of those people moving. People do not choose to leave their homes, extended families and communities unless they have very good reason.

As a human rights lawyer over many years, my work has taught me about inhumanity and the pain experienced by those at the receiving end. Like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I have visited lots of the refugee camps where the wretched of the earth are collected: Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon and the Jordan camps, where people have fled from Syria. More recently, I have gone to Erbil to take testimonies from the Yazidi women who were raped and raped, over and over again. I saw girls who, having returned to their Yazidi families, had to abandon babies who would not be accepted by their communities because they had been produced as a result of the rapes by ISIL militia.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned my recent work. My young team—there were only four of us —worked to evacuate the women judges, lawyers and journalists from Afghanistan. It is shocking that the international community failed so greatly to do something that we ended up having to do. Why should a small group of people have to think, “How are we going to get these women judges out, who are on a Taliban kill list?” It should have been nations that came together and said, “What are we going to do? How do we evacuate? Who are we going to offer places to?”

That should have been done, and this emergency should have been prepared for. However, we are seeing a retreat from internationalism, and that is the difficulty when we call for an international response, because international collaboration is basically what will do the business of responding to these horrors. I recently read a lecture given just before Christmas by David Miliband, who was the director-general of the International Rescue Committee. I recommend it to everyone. He talks about the systems failure of states, diplomacy, humanitarian response and law.

It will not surprise noble Lords that I will highlight the business about the failure of law. A number of years ago, in 2013, I was involved in the creation of a report on climate change and human rights. It became so clear that we would create a sort of cauldron of people movement if we did not act promptly to the emergency of climate change, because people would be forced to move.

David Miliband speaks to the failure of diplomacy, the failure of peacekeeping, which we heard about from others, and the reduction in peace treaties. We used to work hard at creating these, but last year there were only seven efforts to create peace in conflicted areas.

On the failure of law, we have seen a retreat from international law. When the UN was inaugurated in 1945, Clem Attlee described the UN charter as

“our first line of defence”.

He meant that it would be our first line of defence against the abuse of power and that we were, of course, reminding everyone that the rights of people and individuals who suffer, not just the rights of states, are so important. The creation of that rules-based order is now under threat. So we need more internationalism. We need to enrich internationalism if there is to be an international response.

China: Genocide

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, it is with great respect for the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that I say that he has provided the most incredible leadership in this House on what is happening to the Uighur people at the hands of the Chinese authorities. I have all too often made speeches in this House about the full horrors of the human rights abuses that are taking place there. I am not going to rehearse them all again today, but we know that what is happening is certainly one of the most grievous kinds of human rights abuses. When we signed the convention on genocide, we were committing to preventing genocide taking place. So, when our Foreign Secretary indicated that she, too, took the view that there was a genocide in train—that it was processing—she was really talking about the very thing that is to be prevented under the genocide convention.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I too am frequently in contact with people who give me accounts of what is happening to their family members or what has happened to them. As a lawyer, I look for evidence. A report published by Dr Laura Murphy of Sheffield Hallam University—a very impressive academic who is rigorous in the material she uses and the evidence she applies to her work—has indicated that slave labour is being used in Xinjiang province, in the internment camps, and should be a source of serious alarm to us all. As well as writing Laundering Cotton, she has also written a very important report pointing out that 35-40% of the polysilicon used worldwide in the creation of solar panels is created in this province and in the factories and camps where forced labour is used.

Her most recent report is on cotton, and it points out that 20% of the world’s cotton emanates from Xinjiang province and that the way it is produced should be a source of deep alarm. She relied on the first-person testimonies of people who had been held and managed to escape, of those who work in the internment camps as security staff or teachers, and of relatives of those in the camps. They reveal that minority citizens held in those camps are “forcibly sent” to work as part of their daily schedules. Participation in labour programmes is not voluntary; it is coerced through threats of imprisonment, and torture has regularly been used.

People who are supposedly released or transferred from the camp system are often required as part of their release to work in co-located proximate factories or industrial park employment. Approximately 135 camps have these co-located factories, so people are released but have to work in the factories; there is compulsion to do so. In compelling people to work in these internment camps, the CCP has designated certain Uighur citizens as “surplus” labour. They are allowed to live outside the camps, but are forced into this form of employment, and that includes many people of retirement age.

Local governments are required to identify surplus labourers and compel them to take these jobs in factories. The surplus labour programmes affect nearly every minority family in the region. We know that this is a coercive system because the CCP explicitly argues that anybody who is not in vocational training or the right sort of economic condition has to be placed in these factories and in work. These transfers take place on a mass scale. If a Uighur person resists, a state-sponsored programme is put into play through which they are required to take part in the processes that bring them into the factories.

The details of the conditions in these factories are also shocking. There are razor wire fences, iron gates and security cameras. The surveillance is constant, and people are monitored by the police at all times.

The report by Laura Murphy makes it clear that people are paid either nothing or minuscule amounts, but then have deductions made from the small amount of money they might receive on the basis that they have to pay for their own transport and food. The food provided comes at great cost, so they end up with very little in the way of recompense for the work they do.

These are militarised working conditions. People are moved around the country. Young women are moved to places far from their own homes to work in factories. It is all part of what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, described, which is a way of disrupting a community. It has its culture removed from it and experiences serious human rights abuses. This is a genocide in progress, as the Foreign Secretary has said. I hope the House will take note of that as we go forward.

Belarus: Roman Protasevich

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]]

The noble Baroness raises an enormously important point in relation to free media and civil society. As co-chair, with Canada, of the Media Freedom Coalition, the UK unequivocally condemns the attacks on free media, including the targeting, harassment and detention of journalists and media workers, which we have seen a fair bit of. We have increased financial support to independent media organisations and civil society; for example, in the last financial year we provided £1.5 million, and this year a further £1.8 million. Our funding provides training for journalists and supports media workers who have been detained by the authorities. Our support includes a joint UK-Poland initiative designed to help independent media counter disinformation.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am glad to hear the Minister refer to the media freedom project, which Britain has played a core role in. Special visas for journalists at risk, like the journalist who has been arrested here, would be an important step forward. I really want to press the Government on the use of targeted sanctions. There are a number of people who have not been included; for example, Mikhail Gutseriev is a hugely rich oligarch who lives in London, has premises here and is funding Lukashenko up to his ears. We should be doing something about him, and he should be on a list. Are the Government arranging to speak to the leader of the opposition in Belarus, who was due to meet the Foreign Secretary a couple of weeks ago, although the meeting had to be postponed? Is there going to be an urgent meeting in which they might be able to discuss what is taking place? There have been enforced deportations and tortures; are the Government considering a country referral to the International Criminal Court? Has the—

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am afraid time is running out, and there are two further questioners.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab) [V]]

Okay, well, that is fine.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the Foreign Secretary had a useful, positive discussion with opposition leader Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya on 1 February. The Minister for European Neighbourhood and the Americas also spoke to her on 17 September last year. In relation to future sanctions, the UK uses sanctions as part of a broader political strategy—a comprehensive approach encompassing the full range of diplomatic actions. Of course, we continue to assess the impact, effects and appropriateness of that strategy against those objectives.

Integrated Review: Development Aid

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab) [V]]

I join today’s repeated expressions of total dismay. I too am sad that Lord Judd, my mentor and great friend of many years, is not here to make one of his impassioned speeches. He is a great loss.

Two questions underpin this debate. Why was there no proper evaluation of the impact of this reduction beforehand? Or was there? Can the Minister help us? No business enters into some new policy or new programme of any kind without a risk assessment. Was this not done? Secondly, why do it at all? That question was raised earlier. I am afraid that I see it as a display of rather unpleasant populist politics, with the dog-whistle message that charity begins at home. There has been no explanation to the public that the best way to create our own security in a globalised world is to prevent the blowback that comes from failing to help the poor, underdeveloped nations, riven with conflict and disease and suffering the worst effects of climate change. Conflict, poverty and persecution are why mass migration is an increasingly serious issue for the West.

This is not just about money. The UK’s expertise has led the world. DfID knew how to do development and understood that institution-building is the foundation of real change. I have seen it first hand in my own work on the rule of law. Helping draw up law to end child marriage and FGM, which has a huge impact on infant and maternal mortality; working on programmes of police and judicial training; helping to establish specialist courts to deal with gender-based violence; training prosecutors in sexual violence in conflict; working on the law on anti-corruption; developing legal systems and media freedom—all those things are done by the UK using our money in the interests of developing nations.

Development requires a package of overlapping mechanisms. That means fostering democracy, human rights and open government. This is soft power, and it works. How could we possibly think of sacrificing it? I hope the Government reconsider.

Hong Kong: Pro-Democracy Campaigners

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of reports that pro-democracy campaigners have been sentenced in Hong Kong for participating in pro-democracy protests.

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

My Lords, we are clear that the Hong Kong authorities’ decision to target leading pro-democracy figures for prosecution is unacceptable and must stop. The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to Hong Kong’s way of life, protected in both the joint declaration and the Basic Law, and it should be upheld. We shall continue to raise our concerns with the Chinese and Hong Kong Governments and bring together our international partners to stand up for the people of Hong Kong.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his continued efforts in this regard, but is he aware of the letter sent last week by the last Governor of Hong Kong, the noble Lord, Lord Patten, and signed by 100 parliamentarians from both Houses, including the shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy and myself? We urged the Government to impose Magnitsky sanctions on officials in Beijing and Hong Kong for the grave and repeated breaches of the Sino-British joint declaration and the serious human rights violations committed in Hong Kong. In the light of the sentencing of some of the most prominent moderate, mainstream, internationally respected and senior pro-democracy campaigners, is it not time to impose Magnitsky sanctions?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness on the issue of the increasing number of convictions. At the end of last week, further action was taken by the Hong Kong authorities against people who are simply calling on their rights to protest and to democracy. The noble Baroness knows what I will say about speculation on future Magnitsky sanctions, but, as we have demonstrated in the case of Xinjiang, we have acted, and when we have we have done so in co-ordination with our partners.

China: Convictions of Democracy Campaigners in Hong Kong

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 13th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

On the general thrust of the noble Lord’s suggestions, I assure him once again that we are not just working directly in raising these issues with the Chinese and Hong Kong authorities but are also doing it on a range of different issues with our key partners, including the United States and European Union.

On the ICJ, the noble Lord will be aware that the application of any decision of the ICJ requires the agreement of both parties. I suggest that in this instance China may not agree with any decision taken at that level. We are keeping the situation, which is fluid, under review to see what further steps we can take.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, may I first take this opportunity to thank the Minister. Within hours of discovering that I had been sanctioned by the Chinese for my work in this House and beyond in relation to the gross human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese Government against the Uighurs and the people in Hong Kong, he was a great support.

Can the Minister say whether the decision by the Chinese Government to sanction UK parliamentarians and convict—as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Jordan—decent, good pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong will finally lead to the announcement of Magnitsky sanctions on Hong Kong officials? They are clearly responsible for the dismantling of the city’s autonomy and for covering up human rights abuses.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

I am sure I speak for every Member of your Lordship’s House in paying tribute to the noble Baroness and other parliamentarians, as well as others outside Parliament, who continue to raise their voices in the interests of the Uighur community within China.

On the noble Baroness’s specific points about Magnitsky sanctions, while I cannot speculate, recently we have taken specific steps against those operating in Xinjiang, as I am sure the noble Baroness acknowledges. As I said earlier to the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, we continue to see what further steps we may take.

Human Rights Update

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con) [V]]

Again, as the noble and right reverend Lord acknowledged, the Government have rightly consistently called out human rights abuses, not just in the situation he described but elsewhere in the world. On sanctions specifically, as I have indicated, a process is followed to ensure that the sanctions we impose are evidence-based and robust. We will continue to act. We do not shy away. Many rightly challenged us for a number of months that we were not acting on sanctioning figures from China. We have done so, and China is a major world power. We have not shied away from our moral responsibility in this respect. The fact that we have acted with 30 other countries demonstrates the will of the international community.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I too welcome this important collaboration with many partners and the creation of these targeted sanctions. I will speak specifically about our embrace of targeted sanctions. Is the Foreign Office engaging with countries that so far do not have targeted sanctions as part of their regimes for dealing with human rights abusers and things such as genocide? The noble Baroness, Lady Northover, asked about the absence of some of our Five Eyes partners from the coalition of targeted sanctions announced in this last day. The reality is that Australia, for example, does not have a targeted sanctions regime. Are we persuading other democracies to take on board this great new development in international law? It gives teeth to international law in a situation where one cannot get people before international courts.

I will also pick up on the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. Targeted sanctions must be used in a very strategic way. To go after lesser persons is not using the regime in the way that it was supposed to be used. For example, the United States of America has on its list the governor of Xinjiang province, Mr Chen Quanguo. Why do we not have him on our sanctions list? He has been sanctioned by the United States; why not by us?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con) [V]]

I pay tribute to the work that the noble Baroness has done in the context of media freedom and the coalition. The independent legal panel has produced some excellent reports in that respect, including on the use of sanctions. The short answer is that we are speaking to other key partners, specifically some of those she mentioned, to see how we can share our experiences so that they can bring about their own sanctions regimes.

On the specifics of future people who may be sanctioned, it would be mere speculation, but I assure the noble Baroness that we remain very firm on working and sharing evidence with our partners in this respect. We have worked very closely with the United States in particular on these issues and we will continue to do so.

Hong Kong: Democracy Movement

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Monday 8th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord is right to point to the recent announcement made by the National People’s Congress of China, to which I have already referred. Following the current session, we expect the deliberations and debates to finish around 11 March. The next step will be for the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress to formally enact the changes at a subsequent meeting. While there has been media reporting, no specific details have yet been put forward. These proposals are in draft and, while no decisions are being taken, we are monitoring the situation closely.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his answer to my noble friend Lady Mallalieu to her question in relation to our judges and their participation in the highest court in Hong Kong. Are the Government aware of the recent decision in the case of Jimmy Lai, where his refusal for bail went all the way to the highest court, and a decision was made that no law in Hong Kong has more meaning than the Chinese national security law which has been passed? The national security law is superior to any law, be it common law or international law, in Hong Kong. Should this not be the turning point in urging our judiciary to think again?