Genocide Determination Bill [HL]

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I join in the shower of congratulations on the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for sponsoring the Bill, which I support, and for his many years of work in this field. The Bill is not about labelling current or past actions as genocide; that often passionately contentious area diverts attention from what the Bill is about. It is simply about giving effect to the long-standing government policy of referring questions on genocide to the courts. The crucial word there is “referring”—not leaving a possible case to find its haphazard way to international courts, either directly or via domestic courts in other countries. That is why the Bill needs our support: to bridge a legal gap. This has already been fully and clearly detailed by excellent earlier speakers, and I will spare your Lordships from repetition of it.

Today we stand on one side of this gap. We look across at awful events occurring on the other side, and modern technology means that we see these events in full colour and in real time. Questions may get raised in Parliament. The Government perhaps wring their hands and even strongly condemn the actions we see, and they may send some material aid to those surviving or affected. But, despite our genocide convention obligations, Government after Government have stood and looked across the gap but never built that simple bridge towards what the Bill represents: perpetrators being held to account at some point, or the prevention of genocide happening—perhaps as part of a set of other actions outlined so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech.

I will not go over the previous attempts to address this gap in our law and match our obligations with enforcement, or why these have failed. I simply note that we do business around the world. In some cases, the argument runs that we must, in that familiar phrase, do business with people whose systems of government or human rights records we do not like. But I ask the Minister: how bad do things have to get before gestures of general disapproval are not enough? How bad do things have to get before we can at least enable a UK court to give a preliminary determination, on a legal basis, as to whether a genocide is imminent or occurring, and enable the Secretary of State to refer that determination to an international court?

While I underline again that the Bill does not label specific events as genocides, I used to live and work in Sudan. I have been in villages in those parts of the country where people are now being tortured, raped and murdered in numbers and on a scale of cruelty that is scarcely imaginable. I have stood on a hilltop in central Africa and had pointed out to me where mechanical diggers had dug huge pits to be used as mass graves for people slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide. I have met Yazidis and others subject to deliberate attempts to wipe them off the world’s consciousness. When some likely genocidal acts are being perpetrated elsewhere, it is almost absurd, even complacent, to hear in Parliament expressions of outrage and demands that “something must be done” in the knowledge that this legal bridge—something practical, achievable and vital—remains unconstructed. That is why I wholeheartedly support the Bill, and I hope that the House will do the same.