Baroness Uddin
Main Page: Baroness Uddin (Non-affiliated - Life peer)Uighur Forced Labour: Xinjiang
Baroness Uddin Excerpts(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, we are speaking directly to trade bodies and individual companies on the final point that the noble Baroness raised. As I said, my right honourable the Foreign Secretary has been pressing for unfettered access for an independent fact-finding body to go into Xinjiang to look at this. We keep all evidence and potential listings under close review.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I offer my good wishes to the Deputy Speaker and all the staff in the House, and wish them a very happy Christmas.
Our Government have consistently been too deliberative on human rights and international law infringement and violations in Iraq and Burma, the protection of the Rohingya and, in particular, the brutal occupation of Palestine and the murder of women and children there. I ask the Government and the Minister’s colleagues at the FCDO: what they are doing? Are they taking every opportunity to raise with their friends—our friends—and their bilateral partners the plight of the Uighur people in China, particularly the Uighur Muslim population, and particularly to address the horrifying accounts, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, of internment camps, a programme of indoctrination and the forced labour of women who are forced into sterilisation and abortion?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I wish the noble Baroness and all noble Lords a very merry Christmas.
The UK has played a leading international role in holding China to account for these violations, leading joint statements at the UN’s human rights bodies and underlining our concerns directly to the Chinese authorities at senior levels. We raised this latest deeply concerning new evidence with the Chinese embassy in London this week, and we have raised concerns about forced birth control, including sterilisation, alongside 38 other countries in a joint statement at the UN General Assembly’s third committee in October.