Australian Bushfires

Debate between Heather Wheeler and Tom Tugendhat

Thursday 9th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Wheeler]

Of course, the hon. Member asked about climate change. On that, the most important thing is that we are going to be chairing COP26, so we have ambitious climate change targets for all countries going forward. When I go on trips to other countries, I am looking forward to asking all of them how ambitious they are going to be. On money, specifically, we are increasing our international climate finance offer from £8.5 billion between 2016 and 2020 to £11.6 billion over the period 2021 to 2025, in order to help developing countries take action.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to see you in your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. I welcome the Minister’s statement and I am very grateful that the Prime Minister has made the offer to his opposite number Scott Morrison. I also welcome the partnership the Minister has spoken of, but is there more we could do? I ask that because the Foreign Office has such excellent links with the Australian Administration—indeed, we were one and the same until about the 1960s. We have several members of the Commonwealth of Australia sitting on these Benches, and it is a pleasure to have them here. Can we look at co-operating with regional partners, bringing together an alliance of others not just to engage in Australia but to deal with the forest fires we are seeing around the world?

[Mrs Wheeler]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. He is perhaps soon again to be the Chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. [Interruption.] I said “perhaps”. One thing that was really helpful when Lord Ahmad was out in Australia was the fact that we hold the Chair-in-Office of the Commonwealth at the moment. One thing we are doing as part of the Commonwealth is getting member states to work together on this matter, through initiatives such as the Blue Charter and the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy. So we are there as a group promoting environmental protection across the world.

Middle East

Debate between Heather Wheeler and Tom Tugendhat

Monday 30th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) on securing this important and timely debate. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I want to take this debate in a slightly different direction. Our role in the middle east must be to support countries that provide full rights to Christians and protect the rights of all minorities. We must challenge those who seek to persecute minorities for their religious beliefs and practices.

A century ago, Christians made up 20% of the population of the middle east, but this figure has dramatically fallen to 4%. Christians face prison sentences and executions for practising their religion in many countries across the middle east, where hatred of Christians is ignored or encouraged. Daesh is carrying out a campaign of persecution against minorities in the middle east. At least 5,000 Yazidis have been murdered in Iraq since August 2014, with the advance of Daesh forces who have declared Yazidis to be devil worshippers.

The rise of Daesh has intensified the persecution of Christians in the middle east. Countless Syrian and Iraqi Christians have been murdered with methods including crucifixions and beheadings. Daesh has evicted thousands of Chaldean and Assyrian Christians from their homes in Mosul, and in other areas they have demanded that Christians either convert or pay a tax for non-Muslims. They have destroyed countless churches and Christian shrines, and have carried out ethno-religious cleansing of Christian minorities.

Any Muslim who converts to Christianity is considered to have performed apostasy—the conscious abandonment of Islam. In certain parts of the middle east, this is a crime punishable by death. Christians live in a threatening atmosphere in many countries in the middle east, including Iran, where there were hopes that the treatment of minorities would improve under President Rouhani. Christians in Iran continue to be arbitrarily arrested and they face abuse in police custody.

Elsewhere in the middle east, Coptic churches have been burnt in Egypt in recent years. Hundreds of Christian Coptic girls have been kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam, as well as being victims of rape and forced marriage to Muslim men. There are no churches left in Afghanistan. In 2012, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia proclaimed that

“it is necessary to destroy all the churches of the region”.

[Tom Tugendhat]

I very much welcome my hon. Friend’s comments on the state of Christianity in the region. It is, after all, the crucible of Christianity, and where Jesus Christ himself emerged from the Aramaic communities of Syria, which have tragically been destroyed. There is, however, one glimmer of light—the United Arab Emirates, whose sheikhs have recently been building Christian churches. Is she planning to come on to that point?

[Heather Wheeler]

My hon. Friend has made the point superbly well already.