Human Rights Abuses and Corruption: UK Sanctions

Debate between Chris Bryant and Stephen Doughty

Thursday 21st July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) not only for securing this critical debate but for their assiduous leadership on these matters across the House. I also welcome the Minister to his new role. I am delighted that we are engaging in such important discussions before the House rises for the summer, and I thank Members across the House for their thoughtful and valuable contributions to the debate.

Let me begin by reiterating Labour’s support for the Magnitsky sanctions regime introduced back in 2020 and acknowledging the constructive nature of interactions between the Government and the Opposition on, for example, the implementation of sanctions on Russia since its illegal and barbarous invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, I have just received a summons to a debate at the start of the new term on sanctions on Belarus.

Where the Government have got it right, we have supported them, but where we believe they should and could have gone further, we must say so. I express my heartfelt condolences to the family of Sergei Magnitsky. If we are to honour his memory, the full force of our sanctions regime must be utilised to root out and condemn human rights abuses worldwide. Across the House, we know that sanctions work only when the UK works multilaterally to hold the perpetrators of abuses to account by leading and drawing on our historic and defining global partnerships, not least with the United States and the European Union. That has rightly been raised by Members across the House today.

The foreign policy of the next Labour Government will be grounded in securing the rights of people across the world and ensuring that Britain plays a crucial international role in advocating for the rule of law and, particularly when it comes to human rights, working with others and not lagging behind. This matters now more than ever, because we stand at a crossroads: a global trend towards authoritarianism and human rights abuses could prevail if we do not utilise every weapon in our diplomatic and legal arsenals to counter it.

Freedom House articulated this clearly in its most recent “Freedom in the World” report, which concluded:

“The present threat to democracy is the product of 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom...As of today, some 38 percent of the global population live in Not Free countries, the highest proportion since 1997.”

There are so many examples to list. Colleagues across the House have done an exceptional job of providing a sense of the dangers in the global picture and how our sanctions regime must match them.



Of course, in Ukraine, Russian forces have committed egregious and heinous abuses in the deliberate targeting of civilian areas, the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, and the use of mines and explosive equipment to murder innocent people returning to their homes. We are now hearing shocking stories about the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens, including children, into the Russian far east, and the tearing apart of families in a brazen and appalling attempt to undermine and wipe out Ukrainian society.

We have supported the Government’s sanctions regime, which is levelled at Putin’s inner circle, oligarchs and the profiteers of the regime, but I want to put on the record that the unity between the Government and Opposition on this issue is not uniformity. I had some frank discussions with one of the Minister’s predecessors—the right hon. Member for Braintree (James Cleverly), who is now the Secretary of State for Education—when we believed that the broadening of the sanctions regime did not come quickly enough and when there were clear cracks in the system or a lack of resources.

Let me follow up on the issues that I have raised consistently. What is the Government’s latest position on the seizure and repurposing, as opposed to merely the freezing, of the assets of those who have been sanctioned? Indeed, are any considerations being given to the repatriation of revenue to support humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in Ukraine?

I have just returned from an extremely useful trip to the western Balkans. It is clear that the situation in that region is very dangerous and fragile. Indeed, the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt, has warned of the real prospect of a return to violence. Many in the House will recall the scale and severity of the human rights abuses committed in both Bosnia and Kosovo, which I visited in the 1990s. Labour will continue to support the Government in levelling sanctions at those throughout the region, such as Milorad Dodik, for their role in inciting tensions recently.

As has been mentioned, we must hold those in Nigeria to account for the appalling crimes that have been committed—not least the shocking events in 2020, when military forces opened fire at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos. The then Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), called on the Nigerian Government to investigate the reports of brutality at the hands of the security forces, yet to date the Government have failed to impose any sanctions in response, despite their having received, as I understand it, detailed evidence from Redress and Nigerian partners that identifies the perpetrators. We have heard in recent days about the shocking sentences handed out to three gay men in northern Nigeria, who were sentenced to be stoned to death. Surely we must take action against those who perpetrate or threaten such horrific abuses.

After the military coup in Myanmar, the Government took the welcome decision to implement further sanctions against Burmese military organisations—but that took two months, despite egregious crimes being committed against the population in real time. Is it an issue with our existing sanctions regulations, which need to be modified to cope with crises in real time? Or, as I alluded to earlier, are there often simply too few people at the FCDO and the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation to ensure prompt and consistent responses? I know that the number in the FCDO unit has increased, and I pay tribute to the officials who do such excellent work in this policy area, but we are lagging behind the United States and others in terms of the investment and resources that we put in. The staff numbers at the OFSI are simply not enough. We need to see better co-ordination among the OFSI, the National Crime Agency and other enforcement bodies to ensure a consistent approach.

Let me turn to a fundamental point that a number of Members raised: why is it the case that the UK has sanctioned only 20% of the perpetrators of abuses who have been sanctioned by the United States? I cannot understand how we are so far behind one of our closest allies. According to Redress and the all-party parliamentary group on Magnitsky sanctions, there has been a slowdown in the use of Magnitsky sanctions in recent months. The ramifications are immense.

We have heard about Xinjiang, where the human rights abuses have shocked the world. I pay tribute to those from all parties in the House, many of whom are present, who have been consistent in raising those abuses. However, from the party secretary who has orchestrated the brutal crackdown on the Uyghurs and other religious minorities to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which runs the mass coercive-labour programmes throughout the region, there have been exemptions that are frankly staggering. Why have the Government held off? What more do they need to see to do the right thing?

[Chris Bryant]

Another problematic issue with the UK lagging behind others is that sometimes people move their assets in case the sanctions come to them as well. We have seen significant cases, one of which I raised with the Foreign Secretary when she appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee recently: in the case of Sistema, the individual simply gave half his material goods to his son and managed to escape the sanctions. Why are we so slow?

[Stephen Doughty]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend’s point, which emphasises the point that I made about acting multilaterally, quickly, urgently and in co-ordination.

We heard a lot from my hon. Friend and others about Hong Kong. The United States have sanctioned at least 11 officials—from Carrie Lam to Chris Tang—for their role in infringing on the rights of the people of Hong Kong. What is the Government’s trepidation about this? We can look at Ali Ghanaatkar in Iran or Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo in Sudan; the former was head of interrogations in Evin prison, while the latter is responsible for gross human rights abuses in Darfur. I have not even got time to mention the many examples that we have heard from across the middle east and the Gulf states. What of Alexander Lebedev—will the Minister clarify? We know that he has been sanctioned by Canada as a former KGB agent and known associate of Putin. Have we sanctioned him, and if not, why not?

We want the Government to make proper and far-reaching use of the Magnitsky regime that we adopted back in 2020, and indeed the country regimes, but that requires ambition, urgency and proper resourcing. The House has made its voice very clear today; there has been complete consistency across the House, as I hope the Minister has heard clearly. The protection and advancement of human rights should be at the heart of any British foreign policy, and I hope that the agreement that the Minister has heard across the House will result in action commensurate with the violations that are unfolding across the world today.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill (Instruction)

Debate between Chris Bryant and Stephen Doughty

Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Well now, for a start, I am not very keen on the concept of “normal” at all. I have tried to avoid that as much as I can in my 59 years. More importantly, I am not sure that we are living in normal times.

Are there ever normal times in political debate? Surely that is the whole point of constitutional settlements. We do them oddly in this country, because we do not have a written constitution, as the hon. Gentleman knows; we have bits and pieces of the constitution written in lots of different statutes. The danger of proceeding by statute law is that the constitution becomes a constant plaything of the Government of the day. I would always want our constitutional settlement to last at least a generation, if not several, but my anxiety is that we are fiddling with just one part of the equation, not all of it.

Some have argued, as the Government did before the Supreme Court, that a prerogative power is by definition limitless. That flies in the face of history. Successive cases across the centuries, starting in 1611, have proved that every prerogative power has to have a limit. Otherwise, Parliament would never sit; the Government could, in theory, say, “Right—we are going to use our prerogative power of Prorogation just to make Parliament never sit.” That was one of the key things that the Supreme Court found.

My anxiety is that if the Supreme Court has already determined, and it is settled law, that Prorogation is a justiciable matter, it will be justiciable again unless we introduce statute law to change it.

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent and very interesting speech. One of the crucial issues is that we normally know that Prorogation is coming—it is generally known around here when it is likely to happen—but in his example it happened at the dead of night and it was very difficult to get information about it. He will know that, on a rumour, I phoned Buckingham Palace that very night to try to establish whether the Privy Council would be meeting the next day, as I had been told, in Scotland with Her Majesty. I discovered that the Leader of the House and others were quite likely to be on their way up to Balmoral; cameras were then sent to catch them at airports in the act of entering Scotland. It was done in a completely innovative way, and a future Government might decide to conduct themselves in exactly the same way.

[Chris Bryant]

The point is that other people might choose to bring other cases to the courts on the matter, unless Parliament chooses to discuss it and legislate on it. I would have thought it entirely in the Government’s interest to allow the debate later today and to come to a resolution on the matter.