Persecution of Christians

David Rutley Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)]

I remember being on a visit to China with the hon. Lady a few years back, when I was intrigued to find out that there are over 60 million Christians there. To help take forward greater tolerance for human rights and freedom of religious worship, does she think it is important to have greater inter-faith dialogue engaging the Chinese authorities with Christian groups and other groups to help people to appreciate just how big the Christian community is in that country?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I, too, was astounded to hear that figure, because one would not have appreciated that the Christian community was so strong in China. He is entirely right that dialogue is one of the ways forward. It is very important in many other cases where part of the persecution arises from the fact that people do not feel able to speak out and proselytise and publicise their religion and feel it is something they have to keep under wraps.

Of course, the Prime Minister is in China at the moment. Before his trip, I tabled some parliamentary named-day questions, which unfortunately were not answered when they should have been, asking him what efforts he was going to make to raise human rights during his visit. I know that it is primarily a trade delegation, but he has gone to a country where Muslims, Buddhists and Christians, as well as Falun Gong practitioners, suffer torture, harassment and arbitrary detention, and the Tibetans and the Uighurs are prevented from exercising their freedom of religion too. It is important to use such a high-profile visit to raise those issues.

I was impressed by Baroness Warsi when she came along to the recent meeting of the all-party group on international freedom of religion or belief. She seems to be very committed to pursuing this issue. My concern is that she has been given the human rights brief and it is almost as though it has been put in a box so that she will be travelling around the world talking about human rights, which frees up not only the other Foreign Office Ministers but all the other Ministers who are going on trade delegations abroad—