UK and Gibraltar Prosecuting Authorities

Debate between Robert Neill and Bob Stewart

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Crausby, and to have this important and very topical debate on the relationship between the UK and the British overseas territory of Gibraltar on prosecution and law enforcement matters. I refer at the outset to my relevant interests in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

As many Members will know, Gibraltar is a fully self-governing and self-funding British overseas territory. It adheres entirely to the British system and rule of law, and it is the contention of this debate and worth restating that it meets the highest United Kingdom and international standards in all respects. It is a small country, but it is proud to be British. Part of that British heritage is its strong legal system, entirely based upon our own common law.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I thank my very hon. Friend for giving way. I want to reinforce his point by saying that not only is the legal system very good indeed, but the police and defence forces are outstanding. I speak from personal experience, having worked with them.

[Robert Neill]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, particularly given his experience in that sphere. It certainly coincides entirely with my own.

As well as having a strong economy with growth that most places would envy, Gibraltar has a robust and independent legal system, a thriving legal community, a strong and independent judiciary, as well as an excellent police force, organised and trained to the highest British standards, and associated law enforcement agencies. It has, in particular, a robust prosecution service presided over by the highly experienced and very well regarded Attorney General, Ricky Rhoda, and supported by a team of Crown Counsel who meet the same high standards as would be found in any prosecution department in the United Kingdom. I have had the pleasure on more than one occasion of meeting the senior Crown Counsel, the Attorney General and senior members of the judiciary.

It is against that background that on my last visit to Gibraltar, I was struck by the genuine sense of outrage felt by Gibraltarian citizens at every level that I met, from members of Government through to legal practitioners, down to shopkeepers and the taxi driver who took me up to the Rock hotel one evening—once he found out I was an MP—at comments made in this House, I regret to say, on 30 October by the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). I am glad to see him in his place. I notified him of my intention to refer to his comments in this debate. They were ill-founded, they have done damage to Gibraltar wrongly and needlessly, and this is a chance to set the record straight.

Persecution of Christians

Debate between Robert Neill and Bob Stewart

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

May I, too, warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and his party on securing this debate? I could not agree more with the sentiments that have been expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) and the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds).

I say gently to the Front Benchers on both sides of the Chamber that, however good their intentions, we should not be afraid, in the Parliament of a country that still has an established Christian Church, to phrase a debate in terms of religion or Christianity. Christianity can benefit everyone in any society. It gives us in this country a shared moral compass that binds us together. It offers the same to believer and non-believer, Christian and non-Christian alike, not just in this country but elsewhere. We should therefore not be at all afraid to speak up about the persecution that Christians face.

May I join other hon. Members in paying tribute to the work of organisations such as Open Doors, which provided me with valuable material for a recent debate on this subject in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and Christian Solidarity Worldwide, which came to my constituency surgery recently to highlight these matters? Canon Andrew White has rightly been mentioned. I also commend to the Government the work of the former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, in whose former diocese my constituency lies. If Ministers have not met or spoken to Dr Nazir-Ali, I hope that they will do so, because he has shed light on the persecution in his native country of Pakistan and elsewhere.

It is worth restating that while any persecution of any faith is wrong, the pressure on Christians is particular and acute. We must face the fact that in some parts of the world, that persecution comes from a religious/political ideology. I regret to say that some, although not all, elements of the Islamic world demonstrate that problem. In some cases, the persecution comes from states—China and other states have been mentioned—that are aggressively secular. It is right for us to say that it is not good enough for a nation’s constitution to say that people have freedom of religion as long as it is through a state-approved Church. It is not acceptable for one part of a constitution to say that freedom of religion is guaranteed but another part to undermine that by saying that a particular form of Islamic jurisprudence trumps all others, as in Egypt.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Robert Neill]

I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me for not giving way; time is short, and I want to make progress so that others can get in.

I hope that the Government will use the leverage that they have. That is why I do not have any problem at all with our developing trade links with China—I hope that we can use the leverage that comes with that developing relationship to remind people that, as other Members have said, membership of the club of modern economies should bring with it respect for religious freedom, and for Christians in particular.

One particular concern is the situation of Christians in the Arab world. They face discrimination in almost every country of the Arab world, with perhaps the only notable exception being Lebanon. The latest Open Doors list of the 50 worst countries in which to be a Christian includes every Arab world country. It is legitimate, as a matter of policy, for us to seek to use our leverage to change that situation.

I have friends and contacts in Egypt, and Members have referred to the situation of the Coptic Church there, which has been established for centuries, almost millennia. That situation has got worse because of political and religious persecution over the past few months. Again, I hope that the Government will use the leverage that we can have with Egypt to ensure that the new draft constitution not only reflects a genuine right to religious freedom for all, particularly the Coptic community, but entrenches it in practice. For example, it should remove discriminatory provisions regarding the building of Christian churches, which evoke laws that go back to the Ottoman era and have been a problem in Egypt. We have a chance to work with the interim Government in Egypt to achieve a genuinely better constitution for all religious minorities, but the reality is that the largest and most pressured religious minority in Egypt is the Christian minority. We should not be afraid to say that.

Like other Members, I hope that we can consider what more support we can give beleaguered Christian communities in Iraq and Syria, which are some of the oldest in the Christian world, through the Geneva II process. It would be a tragedy if the Arab spring, which we all welcomed, turned into a winter of oppression and discontent for Christians. That is not in the interests of the Muslim majority in those countries any more than it is of Christians.

We should not be afraid of doing religion in this House occasionally. I hope that if we can have this debate, it means that we have got to a happier place, and I hope that the Government will reflect on that when they take on board what has been said today. Governments are entitled to do religion sometimes, because religion can be for the good of all of society.