Uyghur Tribunal Judgment

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani) on securing today’s debate, and I commend her and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), who is no longer in his place, for their very powerful contributions.

The brutal reality that crimes against humanity and acts of genocide can still occur in 2022 is unbelievable. The tribunal’s judgment vindicates what the Uyghur people have been telling us for far too long. Beyond reasonable doubt, the Uyghurs have been persecuted and subjected to torture, rape and sexual violence, forced sterilisation, forced labour and murder by the Government of the People’s Republic of China.

There is so much more, but simply listing each atrocity, one after another, does not lend enough weight to each act—not when 12 million people are suffering for no reason other than their religion or ethnicity. The judgment makes for sober reading. It describes the depraved actions against the Uyghurs, which are, for most of us, unimaginable. Witness evidence describes the desecration of mosques and places of worship, long prison sentences for practising religion, punishment for speaking the Uyghur language and land and money stolen by the state. If there were a tame end of the scale, and there is not, this would be it.

Witness evidence describes how hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs detained with no cause have had their fingernails ripped from their nail beds and have been beaten with sticks and shackled with heavy weights at their feet, sometimes with their hands connected, for months on end, which is unimaginable. The judgment recounts the evidence from a young woman who was gang raped by policemen while a crowd of 100 was forced to watch. There are details of sexual violence so horrific that it is difficult to repeat. There are stories of prominent community members who were disappeared and of children as young as a few months old who were separated from their mothers—literally every parent’s greatest fear.

The tribunal heard evidence that young, fit Uyghurs were subjected to forced organ harvesting, supported by a pattern of disappeared detainees, the co-location of the detainee hospital and a crematorium, and the hugely lucrative organ market in China. Although I acknowledge that this allegation was not proved beyond reasonable doubt, the evidence presented has been acknowledged as presenting the possibility, which is a sickening thought.

The tribunal found that torture of Uyghurs and crimes against humanity

“attributable to the PRC is established beyond reasonable doubt”.

More significantly it found that

“beyond reasonable doubt…the PRC, by the imposition of measures to prevent births intended to destroy a significant part of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as such, has committed genocide.”

The Chinese Government, unsurprisingly, have refused to accept these findings, calling them “absurd” and “sheer lies and disinformation”. The UK Government must, in the strongest possible terms, reject those assertions from China.

The great personal risk taken by every witness who bravely gave evidence must not be in vain. We must provide some assurances and show our support. I say without hesitation that the Uyghur people have my support. I support the calls for the Government to assess the risk of genocide in East Turkestan, which is the minimum required to meet their international obligations, but we should be giving more than just assurances and the bare minimum.

What concrete, measurable steps will the Government take to protect the rights of the Uyghur people? Will the Government join allies such as the US in calling this exactly what it is? In 1948, following the second world war, 39 countries signed the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, which was drafted so that the horrors of the preceding years could not be repeated. The Prime Minister has argued that a determination of genocide cannot be made by a body other than the International Criminal Court. That might be technically true, but the international community has found itself in a position where such a criminal prosecution simply is not possible.

China is outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and, as a member of the UN Security Council, has veto powers on cases taken to the International Court of Justice. For the very reason that a criminal case cannot be brought, I ask the Prime Minister to reconsider his stance. It is clear that the lack of a judgment from one of these bodies does not equate to a lack of evidence of acts of genocide.

[Ms Ghani]

The hon. Lady is making a very powerful speech. I want to refocus her, because I do not want to have the Minister wasting our time by referring to the wrong debate. This is fundamentally about the 2007 ICJ ruling, not the old debate about who determines genocide. This is about the intent of genocide and the Government’s responsibility for assessing whether they are comfortable with that or not, does she agree?

[Margaret Ferrier]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention, I am glad for the clarification and I hope the Minister will consider it in her remarks.

In exactly one week, we will be in this Chamber again, this time to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, and this year’s theme is learning from genocide. Would it not be timely if the Government chose the following few days to stand up against the current acts of genocide in the world, and to show how the UK continues to learn those lessons and advocates for the voiceless?