Freedom of Religion or Belief: UK Foreign Policy

David Smith Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Westminster Hall

[David Smith (North Northumberland) (Lab) [R]]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the role of freedom of religion or belief in UK foreign policy.

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Harris. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate, and to all colleagues who have joined me to discuss this urgent, important and powerful subject. A great number of Members who have sponsored my debate are unable to attend because of pressing considerations, and I therefore give honourable mentions to my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Adam Jogee) and to the hon. Members for York Central (Rachael Maskell), for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) and for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith)—as well as to the many Members who have showed up. This is a cross-cutting and cross-party issue, and I hope the debate can go ahead in that spirit.

Last week, I launched the Government’s new freedom of religion or belief—FORB—strategy at the Foreign Office. It is a bold strategy that is good for Britain, and I will talk more about it in a moment, but I want to start with my own experience of championing FORB, which started long before the Prime Minister asked me to be the UK special envoy last December. Growing up, my parents were involved in supporting Christian Mission to the Communist World. That included, as glasnost took root in the late 1980s, boarding ships that had docked in Scotland from the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc so that my parents could meet the sailors and share their faith.

Those sailors had often never heard of Jesus Christ, or for that matter Mohammed, the Buddha or any other belief system except communism. Also, as a young boy, I met countless Christians who had been imprisoned, tortured and persecuted, especially those from behind the iron curtain, simply for what they believed. That made a huge impact on me—the fact that we can never take this freedom for granted in our world. Sadly, as we will hear today, we still cannot.

The new Government strategy is for people like those Soviet sailors—people who are trapped and punished by systems that deny them the freedom to choose what they do or do not believe. That is why FORB is and should be at the very heart of UK foreign policy. It is about our values as a country, and the right to believe and practise one’s beliefs openly. It is something we can stand for in the world.

[Sir Jeremy Hunt (Godalming and Ash) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for the brilliant job he is doing as our religious freedom envoy, which has support across the House. Does he agree that for all sorts of reasons, including political correctness and a worry about being seen to be glorifying our imperial history, our foreign policy has not done enough on freedom of religion and belief, but that countries that start to erode religious freedoms soon erode other freedoms as well, which is why it is vital that we redouble our efforts?

[David Smith]

I thank the right hon. Member for that point, for his work as Foreign Secretary to bring about the role that I now inhabit, and for his focus on freedom of religion or belief. I agree—I will come on to say more about this—that we should be humble yet bold about what we can offer with our values and should not shy away from these issues because of perceived political correctness or whatever it may be.

It is easy to talk about principles such as freedom, human rights, respect, tolerance or justice, but it is far harder to live up to their meaning in our actions. The history of this country, however, is one in which we have worked hard to create a plural society based on those values. We do not always get it right, but I am proud that in the UK today, we are free to practise our religion or belief without fear of persecution. My constituency of North Northumberland is home to worshipping communities that stretch back to Saxon times. My constituents have precious freedoms—too precious not to share. That is what the strategy is about. The world needs FORB, and Britain is uniquely placed to champion it. Championing FORB will be good for Britain too.

Let me talk about the need and situation in the world at the moment. Most Members are well aware of the challenges we face, but some facts bear repeating. According to the Pew Research Centre, the number of countries with high or very high levels of Government restrictions on FORB is at its highest level since 2007. At the community level, social hostilities involving religion are also on the rise, further reducing respect for human rights in general and FORB in particular. For example, according to the charity Open Doors, 380 million Christians are persecuted worldwide because of their faith.

Persecution on the basis of religion or belief, whether by states or social groups, is taking place on every continent in the world. It involves social ostracism, police harassment, arbitrary detention, denial of citizenship, assault, destruction of sites of religious worship, torture and killings. In Pakistan, Ahmadiyya Muslims are not recognised as Muslims by the state, and their mosques have repeatedly been desecrated by extremist groups. In Iran, the Baha’i are acutely vulnerable to scapegoating, incitement and threats of violence from state authorities. In North Korea, those seeking to exercise their right to freedom of religion or belief face surveillance and arbitrary detention, with Christians and others treated as political criminals if their faith is discovered.

Those are not niche issues. FORB is central to the problems of the world today. Horrific acts, such as the murder of worshippers in a church in Damascus last month, are not only attacks on people for what they believe in, but attempts to destabilise societies and spread division. FORB demonstrates the core principle that human rights are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Those who have no freedom to worship have no freedom of assembly. Those who have no freedom of belief have no freedom of conscience. Those who have no freedom to share their faith have no freedom of speech. Those who have no freedom to practice their faith or belief are not equal in dignity and rights.

Those sound like obvious principles, but we must humbly remember that our own country took many centuries to discern them. For many long, sometimes shameful, periods of our own history we were better known as religious persecutors ourselves, oppressing those who did not believe in whichever strand of Christianity was ascendant at the time. We approach the rest of the world as a country that has erred and learned and that wants other nations to avoid our own mistakes. Countries that respect FORB and where all constituent communities can flourish are more stable, more secure and more prosperous.

So to the strategy. The Government have formally made a new commitment to the centrality of FORB in their foreign policy, and I am delighted to be a small part of that through my role as the envoy. FORB will play its own distinctive part in our foreign policy. There are two top-line aims of that approach. The first is simply to reduce the number of countries in which the right to FORB is significantly curtailed, and the second is to promote FORB internationally as essential to human flourishing.

There are five strands to the strategy. The first is engagement with multilateral institutions and forums to maintain collective support for FORB around the world. I am very proud that the UK has a history of championing FORB within the international rules-based order—something that seems to be under attack a lot of the time at the moment—not least as an original supporter of the universal declaration of human rights in 1948 and of the international covenant on civil and political rights in 1966.

We will continue to work with international partners to take country-specific action where appropriate, whether through the UN’s universal periodic review process or by promoting FORB in multilateral resolutions. That strand underpinned, for example, my visit to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva just two weeks ago to give the UK Government statement on the right of Tibetan Buddhists, and not the Chinese Communist party, to determine the succession of the Dalai Lama. The second strand of our approach is bilateral engagement with countries where we feel we can make a difference.

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

I thank the hon. Member for the brilliant, nuanced speech that he is making about our role and its importance. Does he agree with me and with Amnesty International that there are more than 1 million Muslim Uyghurs in prison camps in the Xinjiang region of China, and that we can work effectively by ensuring that products made in that region, for example cotton, do not find their way on to the high streets in this country?

[David Smith]

In my six months in this role as envoy, a repeated refrain has been that we must not forget the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang. I was very pleased to take part in an all-party parliamentary group meeting with human rights champions from Xinjiang in the last few weeks. The hon. Member is right: we must ensure that our procurement as a country and our approach to international economics and business does not in any way buttress the oppression of the many Uyghurs in China.

The second point of the strategy is to build bilateral relationships, and I will say more on a moment on the countries I will focus on. The third strand is international coalitions of collective action, so that we can work together with the coalition of the willing. There are some countries that are more engaged in freedom of religion or belief than others, and we want to work with those who are passionate about this issue. We are proud to be, for example, members of the Article 18 Alliance and the International Contact Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief, and we will continue to double down on those relationships.

The fourth of the five strands is about weaving support for FORB throughout the Government’s human rights agenda and foreign policy, because FORB is an acid test for the health of other human rights. That means bolstering our efforts to increase awareness and understanding of FORB within the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and across Government, as well as ensuring that tools, training and research are available to staff. I will report annually on that work, including at the highest levels of Government.

Finally, the fifth strand is about working with civil society and religious groups because, frankly, a lot of the time they know what is happening on the ground even better than our posts and diplomatic missions around the world do. We need to try and draw them in and rely on what they are telling us. From sharing information to fostering understanding and respect between different religious or belief communities on the ground, civil society and religious group engagement is central to the protection and promotion of FORB.

We will focus our bilateral engagement on 10 specific countries, chosen for their historical or geographical links that place the United Kingdom in a special position of influence; because we believe that there is a potential to make a difference now; and because of their place on the Pew Research Centre index, in terms of high levels of FORB persecution. Those countries are, in alphabetical order, Afghanistan, Algeria, China, India, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, Ukraine and Vietnam.

This is an ambitious strategy. It places a high level of confidence in our country’s ability to seek justice around the world. It requires buy-in from Government, from parliamentarians, from civil society and from religious groups. It will need resource allocation and, more importantly, it will need support. It will need this place to champion it at a time when sometimes voters are increasingly concerned with problems closer to home. It will require Government to own, centre and adequately resource it, and to know that the cost of failure is high. This strategy could lead not just to freedom for millions around the world, but to a flourishing here in the UK.

I believe that strong support for freedom of religion or belief around the world could be both a blessing to the world and a blessing to the United Kingdom. We use quite dry words such as “strategy”, but in the end I think this is about a blessing.

I remember, in a previous life, marching years ago on the G8 at Gleneagles for international debt relief; it seemed an impossible dream at the time, but we got it. I remember working in my first job, which was on peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, and wondering whether the Good Friday/Belfast agreement would hold, but it held. I remember working more recently, housing homeless people who had spent years on the street, and wondering whether they could rebuild their lives, but they did.

Britain has a remarkable capacity to deliver good things. We have the wealth, the expertise and cultural generosity to turn bad into good, both locally and internationally. In other countries, that does not always happen. There are not many places where social conflict turns into lasting peace.

It would be a thankless waste of centuries of history and democracy to turn away from those abroad who desperately need us. In the contemporary climate, the temptation is to raise the drawbridge and focus our efforts only at home but, if we direct some of our generosity outwards, we will store up blessings not only in other countries, but for ourselves. There is something profoundly life-giving about sharing what we have with others. We need think only about Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone to recall some of the positive impact that this country has made in the past 20 years.

Promoting FORB revitalises our national story, challenges our darker impulses and creates a future to work towards. That is the role of FORB in Britain’s foreign policy—not as a policy, but as a blessing for those who need and deserve freedom. The persecuted need us. We can help them, and in doing so we will positively shape Britain and the world’s future for generations to come.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[David Smith]

Thank you, Mrs Harris—I am mindful of the time. I thank all Members for the spirit of the debate. I mentioned earlier that this is a cross-party issue, and that was evident here today. I thank the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) for his role in shaping this work. I also place on the record my thanks to Fiona Bruce, the former Member for Congleton, who created a great foundation for this work.

I also thank Members for the breadth of the debate. I did not think we would get into 1,000-year-old Icelandic features, but that was fantastic and a great surprise. The key thing the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell), said was that this is an immense responsibility; I emphasise that it is an immense responsibility for all of us, whether across the world with all our partners or across this place. Once again, I thank everyone who has taken part in the debate and has stood—and will stand—for freedom of religion or belief.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the role of freedom of religion or belief in UK foreign policy.