Combating Atrocity Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, all of us are deeply indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who is like a dog with a bone—that is not a very noble metaphor, but I could not think of anything else—as he keeps on reminding us of the importance of these issues and the hard work that he does, not just in making a fine speech but behind the scenes in gathering people together, keeping us focused and reminding all of us of an aspect of the world we live in that is to be worried about. I am grateful to him and to other Members of this House for making us aware of atrocities that are being committed in different places around the world, the failures in our systems to deal with them, and the need for better measures in the future.

My observations will be of a more general nature. I have been a member of the delegation from this Parliament to the Council of Europe for the last five years, and I sit on its immigration committee. Less than three weeks ago, the Chisinău Declaration was put out—Chisinău is the capital of Moldova. It came from the Foreign Ministers of all the countries of Europe, who were convened to look at the problems relating to legislation, as it is embodied in national legislatures, that deals with immigration and the role of the European Court of Justice. A crisis has been perceived in Strasbourg about the erosion of aspects of our conventions dealing with refugees, asylum seekers and immigration in general. Around the continent, countries are taking different approaches to eating into some of the things that were provided all those years ago in the aftermath of the Second World War. The declaration is an attempt to make sense of all that and rally the troops around the core values that are at the heart of that convention.

At the Council of Europe, the Secretary-General, Mr Alain Berset, recognised that similar things are happening to democracy itself; the Council of Europe is dedicated to monitoring what happens in the fields of the rule of law, human rights and democracy. He established a democratic pact, which seeks, through all the agencies and institutions that come under the aegis of the Council of Europe, to take another look at how our democracies are working and whether there is a need to bring in changes and modifications and to once again rally the troops. These two things are happening in Strasbourg, and they have caused me to ask whether some similar exercise does not need to happen in relation to the mechanisms that emerged from the Second World War in the field of justice, the implementation of justice and the issues that we have been concerned about today.

After the Nuremberg trials, a convention was passed almost at once for the prevention and punishment of genocide. Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht had a similar and parallel proposal, which was to have a convention for the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity. Of course, 80 years later, we still do not have that. The United Nations has, I understand, over the last 15 years or so, been working on this, and several drafts have been put before it to make good that omission. The UN has promised that this year and next will be the years of working to bring such a convention for ratification in 2028.

All these different organisations exist, but public awareness of the European Court of Human Rights is negligible. Add to that what we think of the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the convention on genocide, and the ways in which we cope with the absence of a convention or treaty on crimes against humanity, and you have all the elements for a state of confusion—and certainly not for public awareness.

My holy text—it is good for a religious man to talk about holy texts—in this case is Philippe Sands’s book, East West Street, which is truly a fantastic piece of work. In the epilogue of that book, he talks about the ways in which he has litigated and been involved in various cases that deal with both crimes against humanity and genocide, and how it has come to pass that there is a kind of league fight between the two categories of crime and that the crime of genocide is placed—in what people seek in appropriate circumstances—above crimes against humanity. He feels that that puts a difficulty in the way of legislators. He finds it extremely difficult to litigate because he sees that the cases he pursues in court run, as a consequence, the risk of forming victims who consolidate their opposition and perpetrators who consolidate themselves in the position they are defending. In other words, they are producing two categories of people at loggerheads with each other, which is exactly what the cases are intended to solve.

I find all of this bewildering. I wish there was a commission—I do not know what you would call it—that would try to bring together the mechanisms and institutions at the heart of all these concerns in the ever-more complicated world in which we live, so that we could have more hope of consolidated, consequential and positive outcomes in the future. Debates such as this one remind us of the need for such clarification. One can only hope that perhaps His Majesty’s Government can solve all their problems by committing themselves to precisely that kind of outcome.