Immigration Bill

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2016 Lords Chamber

This is therefore a simple and humane amendment, which gives the UK a solid legal basis to push for the recognition of genocide at an international level so that we can then go to the Security Council and say that we have the judicial authority from our judicial system, and press the Security Council to put into action the investigations that are needed. You need to take testimonies from these young women and girls now. That work has to be done, and as we have heard, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has indicated her willingness to do this once she is given the authority. However, that also means that we can give the kind of help that is needed by providing places, under a recognised scheme, to those who are most in need of the kind of medical help that these girls need. If noble Lords were to listen to the account given by this Yazidi Member of the Iraqi Parliament—the only one—no one in this House could feel anything other than a sense of shame, horror and moral repugnance. We have to say, “It’s not good enough—we have to act now”.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (LD)]

My Lords, I speak this evening in the name of those who would undoubtedly qualify under this extremely modest amendment, were your Lordships’ House see fit to pass it.

I have in front of me some evidence in Reports, Resolutions, and Documents in Favor of a Declaration of Genocide by So-Called Isis, Isil, or Da’esh. It is a fairly hefty chunk of material, and I have to ask myself why we, the British people—and we in the House of Lords, who in some ways represent the British population—who have harboured so many victims of genocide over the centuries, are the last to come forward.

Here we have five major reports, from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, and the Knights of Columbus. These are remarkable, full, dense dossiers, which offer evidence. In consequence, we have seven resolutions, which are magnificent in their breadth and human understanding, from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the United States Senate, House of Representatives and Department of State, the European Parliament, the Republic of Lithuania and the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly. I am sure that the Minister will notice that those resolutions reflect two great blocs of democracy, although they miss out India; I have nothing from there, as it has its own problems with regard to this. We have the USA and the entirety of Europe—not just the European Parliament or the European Union but the 47-state Council of Europe. That is no mean set of resolutions, and we have 30 appendices with major support.

I offer this dossier to the Minister. It is carefully researched, utterly accurate—and where is the United Kingdom? It is nowhere. Those 30 appendices are all statements to the United Kingdom, to Her Majesty’s Government—they are all requests. One of mine is in there, way back in October 2014. I urged the Ministers in Her Majesty’s Government to look at different ways, given the difficulties of classifying genocide and of using it, which we all know so well. There are many different ways around this that creative lawyers can work out. This modest amendment tonight is yet another effort to try to achieve that same goal, to define genocide against at least one of the religious minorities of Iraq, the Yazidis, and, if at all possible, some of the others. I speak as a Christian, a communicant member of the Church of England.

My request in October 2014 was rather late, because this genocide started much earlier than that. It started in 2003 and went on in 2004 and 2006; it rose to a height in 2007. The minorities in Mosul were forced to leave their homes, and Yazidis were also attacked around the Sinjar area. They were pushed to the Nineveh plain. We knew; we had our military there. We knew absolutely everything, but we did not even talk about it then. By October 2014—some seven, eight, nine and 10 years later—the caliphate’s design to wipe out the Yazidis and attack the other religious minorities was in full swing. It was characterised in just the way that the genocide convention instructs us to look out for and act upon, anywhere and everywhere that we find it. Even if there is only one case for genocide—one individual—we are tasked to act by the convention that we assisted in drafting.

What do I mean by that? Mass kidnap, mass assault, mass design for extinction of a named race, which is distinguished by its race, faith, dress, culture and rituals from others of the same nationality—all of those things make qualifications of genocide. Under all those headings, the Yazidis in particular qualify. They are a distinctive, separate people within the universe of modern Iraq. For example, they have just one religious day a week, Wednesday. They have only one temple; they do not, like the Abrahamic faiths, have many opportunities to worship at different places. They have different dress: yes, the Mandaeans also wear white, but on a Saturday rather than a Wednesday, for example. They have a different social structure entirely from the remainder of their fellow national Iraqis. There are a number of different ways, in their prayer life and their religious rituals, which differ them uniquely; there is no way of denying that.

The mass kidnap and religious persecution that the Yazidis have endured is falsely justified by some peculiar, perverted distortion of Islam, which is shown by the letter from its leader, Mr al-Baghdadi himself, when he quotes verses, pulls them out and distorts or repositions them, so that Islam is said to justify mass rape and mass extinction. There are mass executions, to destroy the bloodline. For a society that is not allowed to marry out or marry in, it is very easy indeed to wipe them out: if you kill the males, the females have no one left to work with. There is also forced marriage and the destroying of infants. I hope that the Minister has never seen or tried to touch an infant of 18 months that has been repeatedly raped; it is a devastating experience. That is what is happening. They are destroying infants, impregnating young girls and forcing conversion. If you destroy the religion, the bloodline and the family structure, you actually extinguish the race. If that is not genocide, nothing qualifies at all.

Because nobody was listening, my colleagues and I brought three young ladies here to talk about it, in June 2015. One of them, Noor, aged 22, said, “They took the men away in cars. In the distance we could see them being killed. The windows in the room we were held in were painted black. Sixty-three Daesh fighters came in and picked girls and started to rape them. I said to the man who picked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’. He said we were kafirs and he would kill us Yazidis as long as he lived. He would rape our women and kill our children”. That is genocide. On her first escape attempt, this poor girl of 22 was caught, brought back and locked in a room with 12 guards, who raped her continuously for 12 hours.

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[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

In support of this amendment, I remind the House that Britain has been deficient in its treatment of our interpreters. I recall very well that, when the British forces withdrew from Basra in the mid-2000s and we closed, or partially closed, the British consulate—it is completely closed now—three men contacted me in despair and desperation. They were under huge threat; they had worked as interpreters and senior officials in the British consulate and their lives were undoubtedly, in their view, under threat. The evidence they gave me was compelling. I did everything I could; I had no locus, no money, no budget, but by some miracle I was able to persuade a near-neighbouring country to take two of them, temporarily, for what turned into a two-year period before the UNHCR managed to take them out into third countries that were completely safe. The third man, when I said how difficult this was—it was impossible, frankly—said, “Don’t worry about me. I think I’m safer than the other two. I can manage a couple more months before I think they’d find me”. Three weeks later, he was found tortured to death in a shallow grave. I believe that other nations are far more imaginative and constructive in the treatment of interpreters, who are right upfront, known to everybody and, for our services, put their lives at the gravest possible risk and all too frequently lose them. For this reason, I support the amendment.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)]

My Lords, there are some things that I think we can all agree on. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, on this. We all acknowledge that the locally employed people in Afghanistan and Iraq did tremendous work—the interpreters in particular, because they tended to be on the front line. They put their lives at risk and sometimes put their families at risk, and I completely agree that we owe them a duty to look after them and to be honourable towards them. Where I differ from the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, in particular, is that we have not had a policy which is shameful; we have tried and we have succeeded in doing quite a lot to support those people.

We do distinguish, it is true, between those who were employed doing more and less dangerous things and we particularly support those who were on the front line in places such as Helmand in Afghanistan, but I assure noble Lords that we are aware of our legal and our moral responsibility to assist those who suffer as a result of conflict generally. Over and above that, we have a comprehensive approach to assisting those in need who are outside the UK, whom the UNHCR considers in need of resettlement and whom we accept under one of our programmes, particularly the Gateway programme and, more recently, as we heard in the previous debate, the Syrian vulnerable persons relocation programme.

We also accept that we have an additional responsibility to those who have worked for the UK Government in conflict zones. Perhaps it would help if I explain briefly what those arrangements are, because I think there has been some misunderstanding. The numbers that the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, quoted are not correct. In Afghanistan, we engaged around 7,000 staff during our operations, around half of whom were English-speaking interpreters. There are two schemes designed to assist these former interpreters and other locally engaged staff who are in Afghanistan. First, there is the redundancy scheme, introduced in 2013 in response to the military draw-down. For those who qualify, there is a range of in-country packages of assistance, but also, for those who meet certain criteria, relocation to the UK along with their immediate dependants. Under this scheme, up to the end of February 2016 more than 600 Afghan civilians have been relocated to the UK. This is completely distinct from our refugee resettlement programmes.

The second scheme is the scheme that was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, which is the intimidation policy—personally, I think it should have been the anti-intimidation policy. This is designed to provide advice and support to any serving or former staff member whose safety has been threatened. So that applies to anyone, whether they resigned long before the draw-down or not—anyone can apply under this policy. That is regardless of the dates or duration of their employment or the role that they held working for us in Afghanistan. Anyone who was employed by the Government, or on associated programmes, can apply. Investigations take place and mitigation measures can be put in place. These can range from providing specific security advice to assistance to relocate the staff member within the country. In the most extreme cases, it could mean relocation to the UK. We have supported around 300 staff members through this intimidation policy, which is regularly reviewed. In the case of Iraq, the numbers are rather larger.