Human Rights

John Stanley Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), who makes such a conspicuous contribution to human rights in this House. Like others, I am very glad that we have finally got this debate. The House may not appreciate that notwithstanding the admirable decision by the late Robin Cook to produce, for the first time, a Foreign Office statement in full written form on human rights, this is the first debate that we have had on the Foreign Office annual report since 18 December 2008, over three years ago. That delay was, in part, due to the intervention and the timing of the last general election. I earnestly hope that we will re-establish an annual debate on the Foreign Office’s human rights report and that that debate will be a full three hours in length, as it has previously been. The Chamber will be glad to hear that I will be severely truncating my planned two-hour speech to ensure that all hon. Members can make a suitable contribution.

At the outset, let me say to the Minister that I welcome the fact that the Foreign Office has, deservedly, devoted substantial resources to producing this 355-page written document. That is an admirable use of resources. It is invaluable to have it and I strongly support the point that has been made by the Chairman and other right hon. and hon. Members that this must continue in a sensible portable form—in written and published form.

I want to start by referring to a recent document that has come out following the Foreign Office’s annual report and our own report on that. It is “Human Rights Guidance,” which the Government have recently published in relation to overseas security and justice assistance. I wish to highlight two points in relation to that. First, in his foreword to “Human Rights Guidance”—I very much welcome this—the Foreign Secretary says:

“It is of fundamental importance that HMG work on security and justice overseas is based on British values, including human rights and democracy, and this guidance is designed to support that.”

Given the fact that the Foreign Secretary says that, I find it surprising and disappointing that when we get to paragraph 13, where the Government list the human rights that must be upheld when security and justice assistance is provided, the list fails to include any specific mention of women’s rights. It includes, entirely rightly, violations of the rights of the child, but there is absolutely no reference whatsoever to violence against women or women’s rights. I hope that the Government, like me, will regard that as a very serious omission. It is an even more striking omission when the letter that the Foreign Secretary sent to the Committee’s Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway), yesterday, rightly includes women’s rights among the five global human rights priorities that the Government have set. Why is there no reference to women’s rights in this very important human rights document? I hope that the Minister will reflect on that.

There is a further, equally surprising omission, which I wish to highlight in my capacity as Chairman of the Committees on Arms Export Controls. This security assistance refers to assisting in particular what are described as “security institutions overseas”. Those institutions are defined in the guidance. It states:

“The institutions typically (but not exclusively) of relevance in this context are: armed forces, police, gendarmeries, paramilitary forces, presidential guards, intelligence and security services (military and civilian)”.

In other words, they are organisations that feature armed personnel in overseas countries. My question for the Minister is why, in that document, which includes checklists for officials here and overseas in our embassies to follow, there is no reference anywhere to the requirement under the EU and UK “Consolidated Criteria” in relation to arms exports to follow those criteria, which, critically, include no sales of weapons, ammunition and so on that could be used for internal repression. Why is the document 100% silent on that crucial requirement? That is a further question that I put to the Minister.

There is another important sentence in the Foreign Secretary’s foreword. He says:

“It is in police stations, detention centres and court houses that the state exerts its greatest powers over individuals and so where fairness, human dignity, liberty and justice are most critical.”

I regard that sentence as 100% right and I am very glad that the Foreign Secretary has highlighted the critical point that autocratic dictatorships down the ages have always said to themselves, “If we can get those who oppose us locked up behind bars, we can do with them what we like.” That is where human rights are most vulnerable. I am glad that the Foreign Secretary highlighted that. I shall return to that sentence in relation to a particular country later.

I shall now deal with a number of individual countries, starting with Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I am glad that those are again rightly listed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office among the countries of concern. As the House knows, one of the most important human rights organisations, if not the most important—it is important to stress this; it is a Jewish human rights organisation—is called in English the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. In Israel, it is called B’Tselem. As I am sure right hon. and hon. Members know, B’Tselem is loathed in many sections of the Israeli community and particularly in parts of the Israeli Government. That reflects most eloquently the extremely important and invaluable job that B’Tselem does in highlighting human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Last year, I tabled a written question that the Minister himself answered. I asked what had been the Foreign Office’s financial support for B’Tselem during the past five years. I was delighted to receive the Minister’s written answer on 12 October. It told me that after a gap of several years, the Government had made a grant of £135,000 to B’Tselem in support of its efforts to improve the human rights situation for Palestinians in the west bank, the Gaza strip and East Jerusalem.

I urge the Government to continue to give support to B’Tselem for the extraordinarily important work that it does in trying to highlight and expose the human rights abuses that are taking place in the face of the continuing relentless and, indeed, I have to say ruthless policy that the Israeli Government have followed for many years of bringing about illegally the de facto annexation of East Jerusalem and the water-bearing parts of the west bank.

I now turn to Bahrain, as other speakers have done. Like others, I have noted that at the time the 2010 human rights report was prepared Bahrain was not listed among the countries of concern, and—again, like others—I found that a somewhat surprising omission, given that for years now the Sunni, autocratic Government of Bahrain have engaged in consistent and serious discrimination against the Shi’a majority in the country. I certainly hope that Bahrain will be included among the countries of concern when the Government produce their next human rights report.

Of course, I appreciate that Bahrain is strategically of great importance. I know, as we all do, that it is the home of the US fifth fleet and that we face a sensitive and delicate situation in the strait of Hormuz. I also know that Bahrain provides a port for other NATO naval vessels, including our own. However, that is not sufficient grounds for going soft towards the leadership in Bahrain over the gross abuses of human rights that occurred in the country in the wake of the Arab spring against unarmed civilian demonstrators and, as we know, even against doctors and nurses who were performing their professional medical duties, as they were bound to do.

I note the Foreign Secretary’s statement in his letter to the Select Committee Chairman on 12 January, in which he sets out the Government’s human rights agenda as far as Bahrain is concerned, and I urge the Foreign Secretary to adhere tenaciously to the points that he set out in that letter.

If there is one country in the Arab spring firmament in which the leadership most deserves to be brought before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, it is Syria. I know that that will not happen to President Assad and those around him, for the simple reason that it would be blocked by the Russians who, of course, have a very important naval facility in Syria. Notwithstanding that, there is a real opportunity for the British Government to take the initiative. It looks as if the Arab League effort to try to stop the violence in Syria may now be in some considerable disarray and I hope that the Foreign Office is asking itself intensively what steps Britain and other countries can take to try to exert further pressure and to develop further policies that will stop the violence in Syria, and to help the move from autocracy to democracy in Syria that is urgently needed.

Like other right hon. and hon. Members who listened to the “Today” programme this morning, I was considerably moved by the broadcast from Syria, particularly hearing the crowd in a suburb of Damascus shouting, “Freedom, freedom, freedom”, in the background. I earnestly hope that the British Government will not be deaf to the cries for freedom emanating from the thousands of very brave people who are seeking freedom in Syria.

Lastly, I come to China, which brings me back to what I said about the Foreign Secretary’s statement in his foreword to “Human Rights Guidance” about human rights being in most danger when the state exerts power against individuals

“in police stations, detention centres and court houses”,

and other parts of the criminal justice system. No country in the world uses its state power more ruthlessly and more consistently than China against those who wish, entirely peacefully, to take a different view from that one-party, authoritarian state about how their country should be governed, a power that is used ruthlessly to imprison anyone who takes a different view, using the terrible, catch-all criminal offence of subversion against the state. As the House knows, in China in just the last few weeks, there has been a spate of arrests with sentences of some 10 years meted out to people such as Li Tie, Chen Wei and Chen Xi, to name but a few.

The Foreign Affairs Committee recently asked the Foreign Secretary how the Government’s human rights work fits with the promotion of trade, an issue which the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley has also raised. Yesterday, the Foreign Secretary replied to the Committee’s Chairman in his letter of 25 January and stated:

“We do see our trade promotion and human rights work as mutually reinforcing”.

That line is convenient for the Government, and nationally self-serving, but in my view it is an illusion. The determined prosecution of human rights, and the determined prosecution of trade are not, in my view, mutually reinforcing; they are inescapably mutually conflicting.

The uncomfortable reality for Ministers—I accept that it is uncomfortable for them—is that they have a hard choice to make in relation to China and other countries around the world. Do they stand up straight and firm on human rights, or do they basically say that they will go through the motions on human rights and give first priority to our country’s commercial interests? In my view, on the evidence to date, this Government have made the same choice as the previous Government, and have said that they will give top priority to trade. We will pursue that issue in the arms export area with Ministers and in the report that is currently under consideration.

In conclusion, I find the Government’s position on human rights somewhat mixed. Much of the wording, but not all of it, is right, but in translating the words into hard action, in some countries at least, the action falls significantly short of the words. I am sure that the Foreign Affairs Committee will continue to have its scrutiny of the Government’s human rights policy very high indeed on the Committee’s agenda.