Daesh: Persecution of Christians
Debate between Michael Tomlinson and Fiona Bruce(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. Before I heard the start of her speech, I did not know the original wording of her motion. May I press her to submit the motion again and, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, request more time for the debate and possibly a vote in the Chamber? I, too, was a signatory to a letter to the Prime Minister on this subject, and I think there are many more parliamentarians who would welcome the opportunity to debate it at length and to vote on it.
Fiona Bruce
My hon. Friend pre-empts me. He is absolutely right. I suggest that such a motion should be worded in the following way: “That this House believe that religious minorities in the middle east are suffering genocide.” Crucially, that would mean that those who have participated in such vile crimes would know that they face justice and the full weight of genocide law when they are tried before the International Criminal Court. Must the relevant conflicts end before we work to bring to justice those who are responsible for these terrible atrocities? How long will that be? How much of the evidence will have disappeared? How many of the witnesses will have gone?
The international community’s record is not strong on this issue. Our incumbent Foreign Secretary and the previous Foreign Secretary have both lamented on the record the international community’s response to previous genocidal suffering. In 2015, the Foreign Secretary said that
“the memory of what happened in Srebrenica leaves the international community with obligations that extend well beyond the region…It demands that we all try to understand why those who placed their hope in the international community on the eve of genocide found it dashed.”
On the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, William Hague, then Foreign Secretary, said:
“The truth is that our ability to prevent conflict is still hampered by a gap between the commitments states have made and the reality of their actions.”