China: Treatment of Uighurs and Taiwanese Airspace Incursions

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, there are no plans for the UK to join the quad although, as set out in the integrated review, we will continue to look positively at ways to increase our engagement with regional security groupings in the Indo-Pacific. We noted with keen interest the outcomes of the first quad summit, convened by President Biden last week, notably on vaccine distribution, climate change and technology co-operation.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, will we be laying before the United Nations Security Council the 25,000-page report on the Uighurs published last week? It said that the Chinese Communist Party had breached every article of the 1948 convention on the crime of genocide. Or will we, as the House of Commons votes on the House of Lords genocide amendment next Monday, continue to shelter behind the fiction of an imaginary judicial mechanism capable of declaring a Uighur genocide—a declaration that has been made by the Canadian and Dutch parliaments, the United States and elsewhere?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

On the noble Lord’s second point, as he knows, it is a long-standing policy of the British Government that any judgment of whether genocide has occurred is for a competent court, rather than governments or non-judicial bodies. The UK has led international efforts to hold China to account at the United Nations, including by leading those first two joint statements on this issue at the UN. The Foreign Secretary addressed the Human Rights Council, in February, calling for China to grant urgent and unfettered access to Xinjiang for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights or another independent fact-finding expert.