Genocide Determination Bill [HL]

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 28th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, it is pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, who speaks with such authority on this issue. Of course, like other noble Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for his remarkable and persistent efforts, which reflect very well on your Lordships’ House, and I thank him for yet another opportunity to debate this issue. However, it saddens me that we need to. As the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, implied, the fact that we do surely reflects poorly on the UK as a supposed bastion and champion of freedom and respect for human rights, and as a signatory to the genocide convention.

It is difficult to add anything to what has already been said, such is the strength of the noble Lord’s argument and indeed those made by other noble Lords from across the House, so I offer a slightly different “What if?” perspective. Noble Lords might have seen or read about a recent and horrific interview on the Russian broadcaster, RT, with an influential Kremlin commentator. His appalling advocacy of genocide—drowning Ukrainian babies, refusing to accept the existence of the Ukrainian nation—could have been taken straight out of the book, Night, by the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, in which he describes witnessing, on arrival at Auschwitz as a young teenager, babies being flung into firepits to be burnt alive. He recounts his disbelief that this could happen in 1944. Fast forward 78 years to 2022, and here we are again.

My “What if?” is very simple: what if the Soviets had not triumphed over the Nazis and we had had to come to an accommodation with the odious regime in Berlin? What if the State of Israel, of which I know my noble friend the Minister is a fantastic supporter, did not exist and the all too familiar historical cycle of pogroms continued to ravage the Jewish communities of Europe, or what remained of them after the Shoah? Would we be doing any more than wringing our hands? Sadly, I doubt it. In fact, I am confident that we would once again let the Jewish people down. As my noble friend Lady Sugg suggested, to do so, to maintain our current position, is to invite, however inadvertently, further genocide. We are witnessing this not only in Xinjiang and elsewhere, as other noble Lords have mentioned, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, quite possibly in Ukraine—only a couple of hours’ flying time from your Lordships’ House.

I wish the Bill every success. I also wish that it were not necessary. I simply say to my noble friend the Minister that His Majesty’s Government could still get off an increasingly flimsy and uncomfortable fence and make it so.