Genocide: Bringing Perpetrators to Justice

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, who could fail to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and with the sentiment that the perpetrators of genocide should be brought to justice? After all, did we not sign up to that principle at Nuremberg, when the sentiment was translated into sentences?

Three images come to my mind when I think of bringing perpetrators to justice. The rows of senior Nazis at Nuremberg is the first; the other two feature Radovan Karadzic. One is of him smiling with Ratko Mladić—the butcher of Srebrenica, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, referred—both of them assuming that they would never be brought to justice. The third image is again of Karadzic, this time at The Hague as the judgment was delivered. There was no smile then. But Xi Jinping must be smiling today because, while we debate, the Uighurs die. While we agonise over their genocide, they suffer the agony of despair. Time is of the essence, but will we act before it is too late?

Bringing perpetrators to justice is essential, but that inevitably means the crime has already been committed, as we have heard. It is far better, surely, to ensure that there are no perpetrators to bring to justice in the first place. Unless and until we translate sentiment to sentencing for the crime, there will be no deterrence, no prevention and no justice, and yet more genocide will be perpetrated again.