Genocide Determination Bill [HL]

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 28th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Singh, just made very clear, genocide is genocide wherever it happens. There is a simplicity to that statement, but I think belief in it is shared across your Lordships’ House. Genocide is something that we fundamentally understand. It may have been defined only in the post-war era, by Raphael Lemkin, as my noble friend Lady Sheehan pointed out, but that very specific crime against humanity of genocide is one we understand.

Yes, the Holocaust is the most obvious and discussed example, but it is not the only one. Today, many previous genocides have been discussed, some of which I will touch on later, but in many ways this debate feels like the logical successor of the debate in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger. The Minister and I have participated in both debates. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, my friend the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has been tireless in his efforts to ensure that His Majesty’s Government begin to take their obligations under the genocide convention seriously.

As I understand the Library briefing, this Bill is the fifth attempt of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, to pass a Private Member’s Bill to determine genocide. Yet, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Singh, in some ways our understanding of genocide ought to be straightforward. In debate after debate in your Lordships’ House, we have heard cross-party voices, so often including that of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, along with the noble Lord, Lord Alton, saying that we need to call out something as genocide and that the Government need to accept it and act. The response from the Dispatch Box has been, “We can’t do that. It is not for us, as a Government, to determine a genocide. It is for the courts to decide”. Well, this Private Member’s Bill is seeking to assure a precise way in which, when a genocide is being perpetrated or is in prospect, we do not turn away; we all look and respond. It is incumbent on His Majesty’s Government to do just that.

As the right reverend Prelate pointed out when quoting William Wilberforce, you cannot pretend the facts are not there and choose to look the other way. If we know that something is happening that can only reasonably be called a genocide, it is surely incumbent on His Majesty’s Government to act and on all of us in Parliament, in this Chamber and the other place, to do whatever we can to stop a genocide that could happen or is in the process of happening.

Clearly, there are times when it is important to acknowledge that there has been a genocide, and the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, spoke so movingly of his family’s experience of the Armenian genocide. Of course, it is vital to acknowledge when there has been a genocide and pay our respects to those who have lost their families. But how much more could we be doing now to ensure that genocides are not perpetrated? We cannot bring the dead back. If people’s reproductive rights are being threatened now, if we say, “Well, at some future date we might think it was a genocide”, by then it will be too late. We cannot change the past, but we can change the future.

The crime of genocide is the worst, and yet, somehow, it is one that His Majesty’s Government seem unable to acknowledge in many ways. My noble friend Lord Alton pointed out that, while he was a Telegraph columnist, Boris Johnson said that it was baffling that we could not name the Iraqi genocide against the Yazidis. Yet, it is commonplace that Governments—not just His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom but other European governments as well—seem to be unwilling or unable to define genocide. Is it because, as the noble Lord, Lord Mann, pointed out, it can be difficult to define? It is not as easy as simply saying, “Genocide is genocide wherever it is”. But if Governments acknowledge that a genocide is or might be taking place, that Government have obligations under the genocide convention and under the responsibility to protect.

It is vital that Parliament holds the Government to account on their international obligations under those conventions. Equally, we do need to ensure that we have a way that gets beyond what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, called “Catch-22”; it is not a good use of parliamentary time for us to have a debate on almost every single piece of legislation where the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, can just find a chink of light so that maybe we can talk about potential genocide. That is not a sensible way of going about things, however inventive it might be. We need to have clarity on determining genocide. This proposed legislation provides a way that includes Parliament, the Executive and the judiciary. We are not asking the Government to make their own determination, but to send something to the courts. The Catch-22 in the past has been precisely that the courts have said, “It’s not for us to determine, we need some mechanism to be able to do that”. This proposed legislation gives us the opportunity to define genocide—or, at least, to find a way of determining it.

There have been far too many cases of genocide throughout history, even since World War Two, the war to end all wars—nie wieder Auschwitz. We have heard this afternoon of so many genocides and the only one where I have really talked to victims was in Bosnia. I went on an all-party parliamentary visit last year to Bosnia, where 30 years after Srebrenica the mothers are still looking for parts of the bodies of their children; the genocide was not about simply saying, “We will kill young men”; the bodies were ripped apart and the bones we buried in all sorts of different places precisely because that would make it much harder to identify individuals. Those families are still grieving 30 years on. The pain of the mothers who lost children is palpable. That is just one case among so many. We can talk about it now and we can regret it, but how much better if we could act as soon as there was a danger of genocide, because we should not turn away and we must not turn away.

Liberated from the Government Front Bench, the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, has admitted that maybe the line that the Minister is usually asked to rehearse is not necessarily the right line. I do not quite expect the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, to throw off the shackles of government today in order to join us and say, “This Bill is the right Bill”, but we ask him to find a way to work with us so that we are not amending Bill after Bill in an ad hoc way, but so that we find a way to ensure that His Majesty’s Government can define genocide and send things to the court for a preliminary ruling if necessary. This is a Bill whose time has come, and we need His Majesty’s Government to step up to the plate and help us to ensure that the United Kingdom is abiding by our international obligations and that we lead on these international obligations. I support the noble Lord, Lord Alton.