Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill

Baroness Cox Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 29th June 2020 Lords Chamber

We have the power to act. The 10 million will still get their better connectivity if we do so. We all understand what we mean by human rights. We must now have the courage to act. My noble friend’s amendment allows us to have that courage and, if a Division is called, I will vote content.

[Baroness Cox (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak very strongly in support of the amendment, and I welcome the strong cross-party support for this defence of the values of freedom, human rights and dignity. Because of time constraints, I have excised much of my speech, so I ask noble Lords to forgive me if it is a little disjointed.

I particularly pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Alton, who tirelessly champions the cause of human rights for many parts of the world. I have had the privilege of travelling with him to China and North Korea on three occasions, and we have worked together on human trafficking, modern slavery and freedom of religion or belief. I declare an interest as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief.

In that context, I have become increasingly alarmed about the escalating tragedy facing the Uighur people in Xinjiang. This has been well documented by the renowned expert Professor Adrian Zenz, who has already been mentioned, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Human Rights Watch, the Uyghur Human Rights Project and other human rights organisations. The Uighurs are being subjected to a campaign of ethnic and religious persecution that has resulted in an estimated 1 million—and perhaps as many as 3 million—being incarcerated in prison camps. We have heard details of some of the terrible tragedies from the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan.

Last November, over 400 pages of leaked Chinese government documents exposed the regime’s intention towards the Uighurs. Urging that “absolutely no mercy” be shown, the so-called Xinjiang papers provide an insight into thinking at the very top of the Chinese regime towards the Uighurs, other minorities and all forms of dissent or difference. There is abundant evidence, which I do not have time to give examples of.

Regarding mass atrocities, let us not ignore the judgment of the independent China Tribunal, chaired by the distinguished barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice. Last year it found that the forced harvesting of human organs from prisoners of conscience in China has been widespread, and there is no reason to believe that it has stopped. It is the judgment of a seven-member tribunal that this amounts to a crime against humanity. I hope that in due course the Minister will update the House on the Government’s response to the findings of the China Tribunal.

Although much of the focus is, rightly, on the Uighurs, it should not be forgotten that China is undertaking a massive crackdown on religious freedom. A new report by CSW entitled Repressed, Removed, Re-Educated: The Stranglehold on Religious Life in China details violations of freedom of religion or belief endured by all faith communities. I have time to give only one example. Just after Christmas, Pastor Wang Yi was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of subversion simply because he suggested that Xi Jinping is not God.

These examples of suffering and human rights violations are relevant to this debate because of, for example, the use of surveillance technology to monitor religious practice. Surveillance cameras have been placed on church altars; facial recognition technology has spread throughout Xinjiang; and artificial intelligence has been deployed in an Orwellian re-enactment of Nineteen Eighty-Four, with consequences for all forms of dissent, especially religious practice.

In a debate in the other place on the question of Huawei, Sir Iain Duncan Smith said:

“Imagine that in 1939 we had been developing our radar systems and decided to have one of the Nazi companies in Germany directly involved.”—[Official Report, Commons, 4/3/20; col. 274WH.]


I understand that the engagement of Siemens in Nazi concentration camps has now come to light. Corrie ten Boom, in her powerful book The Hiding Place, provides a warning for us all. If we choose to turn a blind eye to the mass atrocities in the concentration camps in Xinjiang, and we welcome Huawei and other companies complicit in human rights atrocities without adequate safeguards, we potentially open ourselves up to comparable complicity.

I end with a fundamental concern. This is not about China or Chinese companies as such; it is about human freedom. I have visited China many times, and I love and deeply respect the majority of Chinese people. I admire their dynamism and entrepreneurialism. This is not, and must never be, a battle between nations, and certainly not a battle between peoples. It is a conflict of values between open, democratic societies and repressive, cruel regimes, which repress their own peoples and threaten others.

That is why I strongly support the amendment and would certainly vote for it. Although people everywhere might benefit from advances in technology, which are so important, those who seek to misuse such technology to harm and enslave their own people and to compromise our values must not be allowed to succeed.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I fully support this amendment and am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and his colleagues for pursuing it so strongly. My particular interest is in stopping the systematic killing of prisoners of conscience for the commercial exploitation of organ transplants. Chinese transplant volume grew thirtyfold between 1999 and 2005, and the number of transplant hospitals increased from about 150 to over 1,000 by 2007. China quickly came to perform the most transplants in the world, despite the absence of a voluntary organ donation system. The industry has continued to grow.

My particular concern with this amendment is that it was reported that between January 2017 and spring 2018, approximately 5 million Uighur Muslims were arbitrarily detained for unwanted blood, tissue and DNA tests. These were followed by the recent mass detention of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province and fuelled suspicions that tests were part of a commercial organ drive by China.