Combating Atrocity Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide
Baroness D'Souza Excerpts(1 week, 4 days ago)
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Baroness D’Souza (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a patron of Redress. No one has done more in this House to persuade Governments to act decisively to prevent and stop atrocity crimes than the noble Lord, Lord Alton. His efforts, and the efforts of others—and here I must mention the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws—have ceaselessly attempted to insert amendments to any likely or relevant Bill that comes before this House. For example, amendments were tabled to what became the International Criminal Court Act 2001, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 and, of course, to the Trade Act 2021. They failed despite strenuous efforts on the part of my noble friend and widespread support in this House. For this, we all owe the noble Lord and his colleagues a debt of gratitude. But there is still a long way to go. The need for reform is long-standing and reflects a structural gap in UK law.
We have heard in clear terms what obligations the UK shoulders as a signatory to the international treaties that address atrocities. We know that Governments do not have to wait for a full-blown genocide, as happened in Rwanda in 1994. The onus is on Governments to act when there is a serious risk of genocide. The UK has not undertaken such preventive actions in recent years. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, also reminds us that we must consider war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the UK’s obligations arising from the UN responsibility to protect commitment, which was adopted by member states in 2025.
However, between 2000 and 2020, almost 40 countries experienced mass atrocities or serious concerns that they could take place imminently. Currently, atrocity crimes are at the centre of four UK foreign policy crises: Ukraine, Sudan, Israel and Palestine, and Iran. However, experience demonstrates that Governments—and perhaps too this Government—tend to ignore the facts of atrocity, such as the Daesh and Burmese military atrocities, which were reported by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, or the recommendations in the reports from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and the International Development Committee’s 2023 report on Srebrenica.
What might be the underlying reasons for this inaction? We have heard some of the answers. A straightforward answer could be that Governments sometimes go to extreme lengths to avoid taking actions to stop genocide and other atrocities, in part due to the international diplomatic and economic risks they entail. For example, it is reported that, during the Rwanda massacres, USA officials were advised not to use the term “genocide” precisely because to do so would have immediately invoked the duty to intervene.
For many years in the UK, a key mechanism for justifying such inaction has been the argument of who is competent to determine the fact of genocide—deemed, by the UK at least, to be a legal definition issued only by a ruling from the courts. However, in today’s world of information transfer, the evidence of genocide and other atrocities is recorded, verified and documented by any number of competent, internationally recognised bodies, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and several international human rights organisations, including well-attested local human rights organisations. If the Geneva conventions require action on the basis of a serious threat of genocide, there is absolutely no scarcity of reliable information. Once again, we ask the Government to return to remedies put forward in recent years and reconsider their adoption.
A Genocide Determination Bill, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, in 2022, empowered groups affected by atrocities, or representative organisations, to apply to UK courts for a judicial determination of genocide or the risk thereof. That Bill aimed to enable the courts, as a neutral arbiter, to make interim determinations of genocide and thereby get a faster response. That Bill, and others, failed due to a lack of time, among other reasons. Undeterred, the noble Lord has, as we have heard today, once again tabled a Genocide Determination Bill this morning. We wish him every possible success, and we will give him every possible support.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights produced two reports in 2025 recommending the adoption and incorporation of universal jurisdiction—a hugely important aspect of law in the fight against genocide. The adoption and incorporation of universal jurisdiction, as an amendment to the International Criminal Court Act 2001, would remove the requirement that alleged perpetrators of atrocities be British citizens or residents, which, in effect, allows Britain to be a safe haven for Putin’s henchmen, or indeed the Taliban. The principle of universal jurisdiction has yet to be incorporated into UK law. These reports and draft legislation offer varied mechanisms for preventive action.
Overall, we do not yet have a clear national strategy for the prevention of atrocities, which we desperately need. Such a strategy might include strengthening FCDO capacity to detect early warning indicators and to develop mechanisms for interventions. Among these must be the willingness to confront authoritarian states and anti-democratic statecraft as a national security priority. The goal must be to embed clear and transparent thresholds of threat and the triggers for action, and, in so doing, provide a lead for other departments—for example, the department for trade—in considering its own policies and action.
I want to end with a quote from a paper entitled A Dangerous Moment for UK Atrocity Prevention Policy from the organisation, Protection Approaches:
“Strategy, ambition and opportunity must triumph over hesitancy, absence of clarity regarding the UK policy position, lack of confidence and a reluctance to put forward creative policy options that centre on saving lives”.
Foreign-owned Social Media Companies
Baroness D'Souza Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a really important point about foreign interference, whether financial or otherwise, in other countries’ democracy. All of us in this country value our democracy and want it to remain robust. The issue of ensuring not just that donations to political parties are legal under the current rules but that the rules are fit for purpose is one that we should take very seriously.
Baroness D’Souza (CB)
My Lords, does the noble Baroness the Leader agree that although free speech can be extremely offensive at times, the dividing line is the context in which it occurs, and that the rules governing hate speech in this country—and criminalisation of speech—must always take into account that context? It is the context that determines whether that speech will have further very undesirable outcomes.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
If a matter appears before the courts regarding hate speech, I think that would be taken into account. The context is very important. We have to remember that we should choose our words carefully when we speak, whether that is in public or online. The days when you had a conversation in the pub and went home and everyone had forgotten about it are gone; now it seems that everything is recorded and amplified at speed around the world. There are people who are vulnerable and people who have malign intent. These things happen in real time and people can face real dangers from people not choosing their words carefully.
International Engagements
Baroness D'Souza Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Baroness D'Souza (CB)
My Lords, can the Minister confirm that the parliamentary visit by the former president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, planned for earlier this month, was in fact cancelled on the advice of the FCDO because of the Foreign Secretary’s forthcoming visit to China?
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
The invitation extended by the representatives of the Government has nothing to do with that. There was no issue about advice or a challenge. The timing is very much up to the people who invited the former president of Taiwan and certainly nothing to do with the Foreign Secretary’s visit to China at all.
Ethiopia Famine: 40th Anniversary
Baroness D'Souza Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Baroness D’Souza (CB)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this debate. “Make poverty history” was the mantra in 1984, and who will forget the pictures of tiny children starving to death? Never again, we said. Indeed, while there has been remarkable progress in Ethiopia in the intervening years, certainly between 1990 and 2015 there has been a clear reversal, due in large part to conflict. It is estimated that something like 4.7 million women and children are in need of emergency assistance, reflecting a global trend of malnutrition once again becoming the leading cause of death in children under five. We hear these figures with a kind of resignation: it is too large a problem for any one source to deal with. But it remains an obscenity that we have what, in many cases, can be called deliberate starvation—a term far stronger than “manmade famine”.
We see two shocking examples in Gaza and Sudan: the deliberate blocking of life-saving humanitarian aid to those most in need—a clear flouting of international humanitarian law. I often wonder how many of us actually imagine what it is like to say to our children or grandchildren, whose stomachs are cramped with hunger, “No supper tonight, and nothing tomorrow, but there might be some food in the future”. It is unthinkable.
There are, of course, some uncontrollable causes of food shortage, through drought, disease or pestilence, but food shortages in these conditions do not necessarily imply famine. Famine is a phenomenon against which whole communities use their last possible defence: to uproot and trek to where food might be available. In this final stage, mass deaths from hunger and disease are inevitable. However, there are many discernible stages before this catastrophic uprooting, all of which can be managed, for example, by ensuring that the price of staples remains affordable, with cash incentives and food for work.
Working in Africa and Asia many years ago, it became clear to me that all vulnerable societies have food shortage survival mechanisms. Some of these centre around diversification of income sources. For example, a village woman may grow crops, weave baskets for sale in markets, brew local beer or ensure that some family members leave the rural area to become wage labourers in towns.
Rural groups often develop life-saving transactional relations with neighbours and with distant relations. All these strategies stand populations in good stead when food shortage is threatened. In this context, we should persistently monitor how far development agencies bolster these intelligent choices, or whether they perhaps instead focus on introducing new techniques which have no inbuilt protection elements.
In today’s world, the most devastating cases of starvation arise due to artificial man-made actions—as I have said, deliberate starvation. These include the forcible movement of populations by militias, the destruction and/or pilfering of food crop stores, control of markets as means of punishing one ethnic group or another, and the deliberate blocking of humanitarian aid.
We are dealing with the impossible—armies and militia groups marauding, bombing and making all coping mechanisms immediately redundant, as was the case in Ethiopia in 1984, when government policies of mass population relocation followed by a widespread cholera epidemic caused mass deaths from starvation. One has only to remember Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward, the devastating famine of the 1960s, when the entire country was forced to abandon agriculture in order to manufacture steel in their back yards. A conservative estimate at that time was that 20 million people died.
What can be done? I believe that the international community can insist on accountability and culpability for abuses of the right to humanitarian aid, using some of the following channels. There should be meticulous monitoring of efforts to interrupt or block humanitarian aid, naming names and following up with prosecutions. I really would like to see a dedicated unit, UN-sponsored or otherwise, to note and list all those involved, including government agencies and armies. New food supplements should be developed for easy, effective and rapid distribution, possibly using drones, along with increased ratification of international instruments safeguarding the rights of civilians in armed conflict. Freedom of movement should be safeguarded and non-voluntary relocation prohibited, and the right of free access to humanitarian assistance for everyone should be affirmed.