Oral Answers to Questions

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2021 Commons Chamber

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

I feel somewhat inadequate that I can only say this in English, but many happy returns, Mr Speaker.

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that, as and when a trade deal with the United States is agreed, the Government will not compromise on the principle that underpins the online safety Bill—that digital platforms, including American ones, must comply with the duty of care to keep their users as safe as they reasonably can—and that that will hold true whether or not the Bill has completed its legislative passage and is enforced by that point?

[Elizabeth Truss]

The UK is committed to making our regime the safest place in the world to be online. In trade negotiations, we will protect our online safety regime, while also promoting our thriving digital industry. I am pleased that in free trade agreements with Japan and the European economic area, we have agreed free flow of data alongside protecting Britain’s high standards, and that is exactly what we would do in an agreement with the United States.

Trade Bill

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 9th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[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.

Trade Bill

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th January 2021 Commons Chamber

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

I wish to make some brief comments about three of the amendments, including amendment 3 on genocide. I have listened to some excellent speeches from colleagues across the House who have made a clear and passionate case for the amendment, and I agree, of course, that states that engage in genocide must face serious consequences for their actions, including in trade. In addition to arguments about the separation of powers, which have already been made, I have serious concerns about the practicalities of amendment 3 and about the amendment in lieu.

The amendment refers to a preliminary ruling by the High Court, but it is not clear what that means in this context, or how authoritative it would be. Neither is it clear how the court would deal with the applications that are envisaged. The amendment sets out who could bring an action, but not who the respondent would be. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said earlier, it is hard to see the respondent being the foreign Government in question. Would it be the UK Government instead, and if so, how would they present a case about the behaviour of a foreign Government, of whom they are likely to have been critical? All that needs to be clarified before such a change in legislation could be contemplated.

Amendment 7 deals with the protection of children online. I cannot support the amendment as drafted, because I think its drafting contains the seeds of potential conflict between current and future parliamentary judgments, and potentially between parliamentary and ministerial authority. I also think that the concerns it expresses are more relevant to trade deals that are not covered by the Bill, although I entirely support and share those concerns.

The Government have made important and welcome progress in their plans to reduce and remove so-called online harms, and offer real protection to children and others from harassment, abuse, manipulation, and misery. It is that progress that Baroness Kidron, who tabled the amendment in the other place, and others, are determined to defend, and they are entirely right to do so. It may well need defending when negotiations on a trade deal with the USA in particular begin. Although I welcome what the Minister said about the Government’s determination not to bargain away the progress we have made, I hope he will recognise Parliament’s determination to reinforce that, and engage further on how that can be done, before we move on to discuss other trade deals in detail. I agree entirely with what my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) said about that, especially his suggestion about how Parliament might benefit from the assessment by the Information Commissioner’s Office on the digital aspects of any deal.

That brings me to amendment 1 on the approval of trade agreements in Parliament, with which I have considerable sympathy. I take the Minister’s point that the trade deals covered by the Bill may not be those where parliamentary scrutiny is most important, but the CRaG processes that he relies on were not designed for post-Brexit Britain, or for the trade deals of breadth and ambition to which the Government rightly aspire. For those, Parliament needs more time and information than CRaG currently allows us in order to do our job of scrutiny properly. The Government need to think further on that, and do more before those broader trade deals are negotiated.

[Claire Hanna (Belfast South) (SDLP) [V]]

We are experiencing a number of challenges with the outworkings of Brexit, not least here in Northern Ireland, and that is, in part, due to the failure to progress and confront some of the realities of the situation. That is followed through by the fact that the trade deal is in place without this Bill, and there is also an environmental governance gap, due to the failure to pass the Environment Bill before the end of what passed for the transition period. Many see that as a reflection of the Government’s priorities regarding environmental and other protections.

I had the opportunity to speak on Second Reading of the Trade Bill in May and, at that point, set out the SDLP’s concerns about the loss of rights, standards and protections that were enjoyed by everybody in the UK as members of the EU, as well as our disappointment about the lack of scrutiny and oversight provided for by the Bill. I do not want to rehash all those as well, but I raised specifically the potentially regressive impact that the Bill might have on food standards and on the NHS, which is an issue of great concern to my constituents in south Belfast. Several of the amendments before us today would assist greatly in protecting and maintaining those standards. I say again that warm words and assurances, and protesting too much, as I think we heard in a number of previous speeches, do not give reassurance to the public if opportunities are not taken to place protections in law. If the Government are serious about protecting the environment, workers and the NHS, they will have no issue in legislating to put those protections into law.

On scrutiny, we heard a lot from Vote Leave about taking back control and about the sovereignty of the UK Parliament, but we see in practice in this Bill much control being put into the hands of a small number of Cabinet Ministers, and very little in the way of parliamentary oversight. The UK Government’s scrutiny processes and, therefore, democratic legitimacy for trade deals fall far behind those of, for example, the US and the EU. If Brexit was an issue of accountability for many people, I believe that this approach is further storing up dissatisfaction with the political process.

Amendments 8 and 9 provide a good opportunity for the UK to ensure that trade policy is in line with other international obligations on not entering into trade deals with those committing human rights abuses and genocide, and we very much welcome this. On the issue of Northern Ireland, trade deals and non-discrimination —that is, amendment 26—the SDLP has been very clear before and since 2016 that we do not wish, and have never wished, to see any barriers to trade from Northern Ireland north-south or east-west. That is what we enjoyed pre-Brexit, as well as trading arrangements with the vast majority of the planet, but we are now restricted by the need to manage the problems that have been foisted upon us by an ill-thought-out Brexit. The Ireland-Northern Ireland protocol exists precisely to protect the people of Northern Ireland from the risks and consequences of a hard border. We therefore have to take a very cautious approach to anything that might inadvertently or deliberately undermine that. It remains the case—I will finish with this point—that the higher the UK’s commitments to the standards that we maintain here in Northern Ireland, the softer the barriers to trade in the Irish sea will be.