Trade Bill

Imran Hussain Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion & Programme motion: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab) [V]]

I wish to focus my remarks on what the Bill and the Government’s trade policy means for human rights around the world in terms of our existing obligations and our commitment as a country to stand up against human rights abuses wherever they take place.

When striking trade deals across the world, many nations use trade to influence human rights policy, yet there is concern that, faced with the need to strike quick deals to demonstrate success in the aftermath of Brexit, the Government will water down human rights protections, particularly when China, India and Russia—all countries with a poor record on human rights—rank within the UK’s top 25 export and import markets.

China’s deliberate evasion of human rights is well known, with the mass detention, torture and mistreatment of the Uyghur Muslims in particular, along with controls on their daily lives. Russia is also notorious for its weak human rights record, lack of accountability for those in public office and widespread torture and persecution.

While any abuse of human rights is abhorrent and must be challenged, the Indian Government’s human rights abuses in Indian-occupied Kashmir—well-documented by several human rights organisations, including the United Nations—is particularly important for my constituents in relation to any trade deals with India. As we speak, the region is now almost 10 months into a brutal lockdown that has seen cities, towns and villages placed under what is in effect a siege, with food, water and medicines restricted from entering and civilians restricted from leaving. This lockdown has also seen communications cut on an unprecedented scale, which has prevented any spread of information and left security forces even more unaccountable. With a need for reliable information to restrict the spread of coronavirus, this electronic curfew causes yet more harm.

Sadly, this experience is nothing new for the sons and daughters of Kashmir. They are routinely subjected to persecution, discrimination and heavy-handed tactics by Indian security forces, with a disproportionate use of force, including the indiscriminate firing of live ammunition and the routine use of pellet guns that have left hundreds of Kashmiris, including children, blind for life. That is to say nothing of the repressive control measures, rapes, tortures and indiscriminate detentions that take place across the region at the hands of the security forces. What is scandalous is that those committing these human rights abuses are immune from prosecution under the Indian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, rendering them in effect untouchable, despite their crimes.

The Indian Government also continue to deny the Kashmiris their right to self-determination, as was mandated by a United Nations Security Council resolution that is now well over 70 years old. There is no prospect any time soon of the vote that will allow them to shape their own destiny, particularly following the illegal decision to revoke articles 370 and 35A. In effect, that decision repeals what little autonomy Kashmir held in its position as a disputed territory at the heart of an unresolved conflict. What the Indian Government are doing in Indian-occupied Kashmir is vile and abhorrent, and it must be called out and challenged.

We cannot let our desire for trade allow us to ignore this. The Government must not be afraid to put human rights and high standards before trade, especially when it concerns those nations, such as India, with whom we share strong historical, cultural and social ties. In this region in particular, we have both a historical and moral duty, and as is the case with all human rights abuses, it is an international issue, not a domestic one or a bilateral one, that we cannot and must not ignore.

With time not permitting me to speak longer, let me say in conclusion that while this Bill allows the UK to pursue new trade deals, it must not pursue a new approach on human rights or overturn years of hard work in pursuit of a quick deal that turns a blind eye to human rights abuses, human suffering, the abuse of workers or the watering down of environmental protections. Instead, it must commit to strengthening our human rights commitments and to ensuring that any future trade deal incorporates the highest standards on human rights. At the very least, this means an end to the detention camps in China and to the persecution, discrimination and injustice in Kashmir, with the repeal of the special powers Act and a free, fair and independent plebiscite for Kashmiris to decide their own future, in line with the United Nations resolutions that this House has an absolute duty to uphold.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

The last speaker from the Back Benches is Fay Jones.

Trade Bill

Imran Hussain Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 9th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We will leave it there, Sir Robert.

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab) [V]]

Genocide and grave human rights abuses are the most horrific and wicked crimes a state can commit, and those who perpetrate such crimes should be held accountable by this Government and the entire international community. Let me be absolutely clear: they are not internal issues, as Ministers often claim, but international issues. The Government should therefore be using the trade deals they negotiate with other countries as a means of strengthening our human rights commitments, as I advocated during the passage of the Bill last year.

Yet despite so many Members from across the House agreeing that trade deals should at least uphold our human rights obligations, Ministers have shown that they believe otherwise, defeating by the slimmest of margins the amendments that would have prevented them from signing trade deals with genocidal states, and proposing today a counter-amendment that is a pale imitation of what we should be doing as a country. In acting this way, they risk further emboldening those who continue to commit serious crimes against humanity. We have, sadly, already seen where refusing to take strong action against the Burmese military for their genocide of the Rohingya, for example, leads.

The bottom line is that we should not be signing any trade deal with any state that is committing any crime against humanity. Turning a blind eye and doing business with the very regimes that torture, abuse and kill others will sign away any moral authority that we have to call ourselves defenders of human rights, to enforce sanctions against abusers, or to advocate for stronger protections. However, while the Government’s previous vote against the amendments and the amendment they propose today are bitterly disappointing, they are sadly not surprising. On far too many occasions, I have urged them in Parliament to act against those committing human rights abuses and genocide, including in Kashmir. I have repeatedly called for action to protect Kashmiris from the persecution, oppression and injustice that they face on a daily basis at the hands of the Indian armed forces, only for Ministers to utter warm but meaningless and hollow words while the sons and daughters of Kashmir continue to suffer.

Trade is one of the few tools that we have left, in an interconnected, globalised world, to pursue a foreign policy based on protecting human rights. We must therefore take strong action in this Bill to show that we value human rights and that we will stand up for the many persecuted and oppressed peoples around the world.

[Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con) [V]]

Let me start with the amendments on genocide. The revised amendment 3B deals with some of the deficiencies of the original, but not, I am afraid, all. I still have the concerns that I have expressed previously about how the judicial process that it sets out will work in practice and about what a High Court judgment in such cases will really mean. I also think that the concerns that others have expressed about the effect of a finding that genocide has not taken place are well founded.

This may be strange thing for a former Attorney General to say, but I wonder whether we are getting too hung up on the judgments of courts. It is true, of course, that Governments have routinely relied on the courts to make a formal finding of genocide when guilt must be proven to a required legal standard, but we are discussing trade negotiations, not criminal convictions. In that context, if we have good evidence that genocide or anything like it is being committed by the country with which we are proposing to do a trade deal, we should retain the right not to do that deal with it, whether there is a formal judicial determination of the specific crime of genocide or not.

That is why I support the amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill). Under that amendment, the trigger for a parliamentary vote is not a court ruling, with all the difficulties and pitfalls that brings, but rather the much lower bar of credible reports of genocide. That means that, unlike under amendment 3B, we can decide to refuse a trade deal with a country we believe has engaged in genocide despite the absence of a court ruling that it has done so. That is, in effect, a higher standard of human rights protection than that proposed in the amendment from the other place.

The judgment of Parliament on potential trade deals is important, and it is important that our judgment is exercised at the appropriate time in the negotiating process. For me, that means that Parliament should have its say when a negotiating mandate is being drawn up, not solely when the deal is done. However, I have two problems with Lords amendment 1B, which provides for that.