Human Rights in Hong Kong

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Ghani. I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Gedling (Tom Randall) on securing this debate. One of the things that he was quite right to say in his introduction was that this should not be about the history of our relationship with Hong Kong, and it is certainly not about recreating some sort of imperial past.

I think our own recent history with regard to the territory is worth reflecting on. The position in which we find ourselves today has not happened overnight; it is the product of three decades—possibly more—of British foreign policy and our determination to put commercial interests over human rights. I co-chair the all-party parliamentary group on Hong Kong with Baroness Bennett, and I am also a patron of Hong Kong Watch. We have seen a repeated pattern of people telling us, when we speak about human rights, “Maybe just wind your neck in. There is another deal coming. There is a delegation going. There is going to be a visit or a conference.”

In the years since we completed and entered into the joint declaration, we have essentially sent all the wrong signals, and that has brought us to where we are today. I am genuinely delighted that the Government have taken the action they have on BNO passport holders. How much better and stronger might our position be if we had done that at the point of handover in 1997? That was surely the point at which we could have sent a signal that we intended to stand with the people of Hong Kong. Our failure at that time was seen by the Chinese Government as an indication that we perhaps did not mean the things we said in the joint declaration.

That is ironic, when one considers that we entered into the joint declaration because of our experience in relation to the Falkland Islands. That was another instance where we had sent the wrong signals to a despotic regime, which then thought it could take advantage of that. We tried to avoid the same thing happening again by entering into the joint declaration, but we do not seem to have learned the lessons.

There are a couple of issues I want to touch on briefly. The first relates to the position of the BBC in Hong Kong and China. Its relationship with Radio Television Hong Kong as its local partner is becoming increasingly problematic. On 1 March this year, the new head of RTHK, a career civil servant, Patrick Li, took charge. He pledged editorial independence, but he said that there cannot be “freedom without restraint”. George Orwell would have been proud of that one. With the World News TV channel taken off air in China, and the blocking of news channels and internet provision for years, we have to look at what more we can do to support the World Service, which is still the blue chip standard in broadcasting around the world.

Secondly, I would like to hear more from Government about what we are saying to financial institutions, such as HSBC and Standard Chartered, that have come out in support of the national security law. That we allow them to continue to operate as normal in this country seems to contradict what we say of our intentions towards Hong Kong. It has been reported that there have been no fewer than 16 private meetings between the Treasury and those two banks in the six months from July to December 2020. What was said at those meetings, and why are we still engaging on a business-as-usual basis?