Genocide Determination Bill [HL]

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for keeping matters of this kind before us and demanding that we give them our attention. I am most grateful.

In a briefing paper that I was very impressed by, I saw a formula showing the atrocities that have existed in Iraq, Sudan, China, Ethiopia, Tigray and Myanmar. At the end of each section, it said:

“If, as stipulated in Clause 1 of the Genocide Determination Bill, a determination of genocide was made, Clause 3 actions could include”—


and then it laid out those possible actions.

I come at the Bill and this discussion from the perspective of the end of Claude 3—I am sorry, Clause 3. There must be somebody here named Claude who I keep on subconsciously thinking about. A month ago, in Stockholm, with the Syriac Eastern Orthodox congregation, I laid a wreath at the monument for the victims of the Armenian genocide early in the 20th century. My son-in-law is Cambodian. His parents were drafted forcibly into Pol Pot’s army and their lives completely wrecked, and he was raised in a Buddhist monastery. I have sensed in Cambodia, on my regular visits, the awful things that happened there. I was in Bosnia in 2010, and I was with the families of people who were still crying uncontrollably at the aftermath of what had happened—under Dutch protection, so they thought—with the killing of those boys and men. There was slaughter in East Timor, and I have met Timorese people too. I was at the plebiscite that brought Eritrea into existence in 1993 and had occasion to meet people who for 30 years had been subject to the depredations and warmongering of nearby Ethiopia. In Haiti—I need not rehearse this too much; people will have heard me speak on Haiti many times—after a military junta forced a democratically elected President and Government out, the United Nations proved totally incapable of handling the ensuing chaos. I have performed the marriage of a young woman who was the only survivor of her whole community who were eradicated in Kigali.

I have got too close personally to some of the victims in these manifold places where atrocities occur for me to feel that I can keep any distance from it at all. Consequently, I have to ask this critical question: why are those mechanisms that exist—in the Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and so on—so ineffective at bringing charges in order to bring these things to light and pass judgment on them? Some of these cases have been waiting for ever while some, as in Myanmar, have been totally overlooked, marginalised and forgotten about—they hope. So my attention is focused on Clause 3 and the injustices that occur, not by missing a determination—let others talk about that—but by waiting for justice.