Genocide: Bringing Perpetrators to Justice Debate
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Baroness Falkner of Margravine
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Genocide: Bringing Perpetrators to Justice
Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for securing this debate. I am sure the Minister will have heard the frustration from every speaker who has yet spoken with the current impasse, where we are going nowhere on doing anything to properly prevent genocide.
I want to pick up the theme of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn on the tricky issue of what the international community can and should do, particularly where genocide is a slow burn. It does not happen all of a sudden. It starts with removing human rights protections from certain groups, mainly ethnic groups; then by imposing new laws that impinge on their ability to live and work freely in society; then by using new laws to deny these peoples and groups the right to inhabit a society in security and freedom. Usually, the culmination is violence to drive them out and/or bring about their extinction. That is the course we have seen throughout the 70 years of the convention and before it, under the Nazis and the genocide of the Jewish people. So also in Darfur, in Rwanda, with the Yazidis and now with the Uighurs in China, it follows the same course. China is of course more egregious in many ways, as those people have nowhere to flee.
My question to the Government, borne out of the frustration of the ineffectiveness of the UN in this regard, is that, since the Security Council is incapable of consensus on these matters, will they work with like-minded countries such as those in the Accountability, Coherence and Transparency Group, to establish a risk register to monitor the slow burn of genocide so that human rights violations in a given country that point in the direction of genocide can be monitored? The international community can then use responsibility to protect and other measures in coalitions of the willing to take the necessary actions that they may need to before the act occurs.