Human Rights

Lord Wright of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wright of Richmond]

My Lords, I shall briefly pursue two themes in the short time that we have available to us in this debate. The first relates to North Korea. My noble friend Lord Alton of Liverpool called for a new peace conference to be jointly convened by Switzerland and Britain and held in Beijing to enable North and South Korea to conclude a formal peace treaty on the precedent of the Helsinki process. Having attended the Helsinki conference in 1976, I am as aware as anyone—although perhaps we were not all fully aware at the time—of the extent to which that conference was to lead to the collapse of the totalitarian system in the Soviet empire, ending much of the violation of human rights that went with those systems. My noble friend’s proposal is one that deserves serious and urgent consideration and support.

My second theme is to draw attention once again, as I have so often in this House, to the appalling abuse of the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank and in east Jerusalem. I submit that this is, in some ways, even more shocking than many of the human rights abuses to which noble Lords have drawn attention in this debate, since they are violations committed by the Government of a self-proclaimed democracy who pride themselves on the rule of law, and who should be ashamed, as many of their citizens and supporters are, to have their human rights record bracketed with the monstrous regime of North Korea. Leaving aside the illegality of the growing settlements in the West Bank, and the increasing violation of human rights to which various independent reports have drawn attention during the past year, there is continuing destruction of olive groves and other means of Palestinian livelihood in the West Bank, and the destruction and blockade of roads that enable West Bank Palestinians to move from the West Bank to Jerusalem. Then there is the treatment of children in Israeli military courts, the eviction of Palestinians and the demolition of their homes in East Jerusalem and the extension of the wall, which blocks access for Palestinians to their homes, to medical care, to their place of work and, often, to their schools, thereby depriving them of their right to education, to which the noble Lord, Lord Sacks, referred so eloquently. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure the House that Her Majesty’s Government continue not only to protest to the Government of Mr Netanyahu about these violations but to join our European partners in drawing them to the attention of our American friends.

Only the United States Government have unique potential influence on the Israelis to stop these abuses, which represent a serious, and probably fatal, block on any progress towards a two-state settlement of this long-running dispute. Since this debate falls only a few days after the opening of the new European Delegation Office in Washington, I hope that this provides an opportunity for our embassy in Washington to work even more closely with our European partners to persuade the United States Administration to recognise that Israeli violation of human rights risks destroying any hope of achieving a situation whereby Israel and her Palestinian neighbour can live together in peace and mutual respect.