China: Genocide

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Alton has most admirably and in great detail set out the facts that confront us. I will not repeat what he said, because he has been an example to all of us in the way that he has brought this matter, time and again, before your Lordships’ House.

I suspect that I may be one of the few Members of your Lordships’ House, perhaps the only one, who has some direct experience, and indeed shared collective responsibility, of having failed to avert not one but two genocides—those in Rwanda and at Srebrenica—when I was Britain’s representative at the UN Security Council. Those were genocides that met the Government’s —in my view—narrow and legalistic criterion of being so judged by an international court. That experience scarred my conscience and demonstrated how defective the 1948 genocide convention was, lacking as it did any enforcement provisions or processes.

Following those two searing events, some progress was made to meet the challenges of prevention of genocide and retribution for it. In 1999, the International Criminal Court was established, albeit with a lot of signatories missing, and, in 2005, the “responsibility to protect” norm was endorsed unanimously at a UN summit. But neither of these steps forward has prevented further genocides being committed—most notably and unmistakeably, I would argue, in an instance mentioned by my noble friend Lord Alton, on the Yazidi community in northern Iraq and Syria by IS, for which, shamefully, no legal proceedings at the ICC have yet been instituted.

Now, in Xinjiang, evidence has emerged, validated by journalists, academics, and members of the Uighur community and their families, by technical means and by many Members of your Lordships’ House, of acts by the Chinese Government which undoubtedly constitute serious breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights against the Uighur people of that region and which, being based on ethnic and religious identity, resemble genocide or a prelude to it. Faced with this evidence, what has been the Government’s response? To repeat what I have called a narrow, legalistic definition of genocide, that only an international court can define it as such.

There are, I suggest, two fundamental defects to that view. The first is that, for genocide to be so deemed, a lot of people—in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands, and at Srebrenica, thousands—have first to be killed. The second is that, as China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council with a veto, and a non-member of the ICC, there is not the slightest chance of that criterion ever being met.

I therefore hope that, when the Minister replies to this debate, he will not simply repeat what has been said so often before, and cease saying what the Government will not do when genocidal evidence emerges, as it has done, and will focus rather on what they will say and will do. First, I suggest that, if such evidence is solid and convincing—and it looks like that to me—the Government should not hesitate to say that it constitutes a prima facie case for deeming that genocide is taking, or has taken, place. Secondly, I hope that he will also say that, if they do take that view on the prima facie case, our policies will be based on and guided by that prima facie judgment. If we can take those two steps, we would be beginning to contribute effectively both to prevention and to retribution, instead of just wringing our hands and waiting for the bodies to be brought out.