Human Rights

Martin Horwood Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

I praise the hon. Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) for initiating this debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) and other hon. Members who have contributed to the debate, especially the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley), who gave an eloquent declaration in defence of human rights and some well-made points about the rights of women and the valuable work of organisations such as B’Tselem, which I am happy to endorse.

While I am heaping praise on people, I would not mind praising Conservative Ministers—from the other side of the coalition, I guess—not only for producing human rights reports, which is the easy part of the process, but for the frequent declarations that I have heard in the House by the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), who is here today, and by the Foreign Secretary, making clear Britain’s absolute commitment to human rights in a wide range of contexts.

As a Liberal Democrat in the coalition, human rights are central to my political beliefs. I date human rights policy back to a Liberal campaign—the Midlothian campaign—by possibly the greatest Liberal, William Gladstone, who in 1880 explicitly balanced the national strategic interest with the rights of people who were not even British citizens at the time. In many ways, that was the origin of international human rights policy. I am proud and humbled to stand in that tradition. For that reason, I welcome many of the recommendations, some of them quite tough, in the Select Committee report.

I particularly like recommendation 3, which states that

“failing to take a stronger and more consistent stance against human rights violations by overseas regimes can carry risks for the UK. In particular, any suggestion that the FCO downplays criticism of human rights abuses in countries with which the UK has close political and commercial links is damaging to the UK’s reputation, and undermines the department’s overall work in promoting human rights overseas.”

The report relates that to north Africa and the middle east, but it applies worldwide, although it was the Arab spring, as the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) said, which highlighted in some areas of policy, such as arms control, the weakness of some of our human rights checks on Government policy—not just this Government, but certainly the previous one, from whom we inherited the system. For instance, it appeared that, instead of a human rights check being carried out to consider the potential for arms to be used for internal repression, checks were made in respect of whether they were being used for repression at that moment, which effectively excused every regime in north Africa and the middle east, many of which had the most appalling human rights records. The report’s recommendations relating to that are well made.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to include Bahrain in the next human rights report and their response to the situation in respect of the Arab spring, which included cancelling more than 160 arms export licences, some clear declarations in the House of Commons and the declaration, in response to the Committee’s report, that more work by Government was needed in this area.

First, in connection with the international arms trade treaty, we may possibly have some international collaboration that may contribute to some solution to that issue. What is the current state of negotiations on the international arms trade treaty? Does the Minister think that that could enable us to address human rights matters in the context of international arms sales? Secondly, if the Government have concluded that further work between BIS and the FCO is needed on this matter, is not it about time for them to agree on how that should be done and get on with doing it in some form? Thirdly, and finally, the Committee’s specific recommendation that we review arms sales to Saudi Arabia is well made. That is potentially a lucrative market that is valuable in respect of growth, and so on, but it is morally unacceptable to sell arms to repressive dictatorships, which may use them on their own people and may already have used military matériel in helping to suppress dissent in a neighbour’s territory.

I shall resist the temptation to do a world tour of human rights and will focus on Russia and China, two big, influential powers with domestic human rights issues, which are also major international players and permanent members of the Security Council and are therefore important in that respect.

In the case of Russia, I want to focus, first, on the appalling case of Sergei Magnitsky, who died in 2009. There is a campaign to bring his persecutors to justice but there is a sense among some of those who are campaigning on his behalf that Britain is perhaps a little behind other states in taking firm action on this case, despite the fact that Sergei Magnitsky was a lawyer working for a British company and Bill Browder, who is spearheading the campaign to bring Magnitsky’s persecutors to justice, is a British citizen.

In the US, the Netherlands and Switzerland, we have seen sanctions or progress towards sanctions, in the form of targeted visa bans or the freezing of assets, against the individuals implicated in the Magnitsky case. Moreover, because the Netherlands and Switzerland are part of the Schengen agreement, their action could close off most of Europe to those individuals. Nevertheless, I want to hear from the Minister if the Government are considering whether Britain should take similar action.

Then there are the cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, who are now widely acknowledged by many people as political prisoners. Khodorkovsky has never seen his granddaughter. When representatives of the media or other third parties visit him in prison, those visits are taken away from the number of visits that he is allowed to receive from his own family, so he is suffering considerably.

There also ought to be honourable mention of Vasily Aleksanyan, who was a legal counsellor to Khodorkovsky’s company, Yukos. He died in prison last year, having turned down the offer of what was in effect a plea bargain, whereby he would perhaps have incriminated Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. He turned that offer down and it probably cost him his life.

I want Ministers not only to continue raising the cases of Magnitsky, Khodorkovsky, Lebedev and others, and consider imposing visa bans, but to reflect on some of the language that we are using about the European Court of Human Rights. Although I completely agree with the Government that the ECHR needs reform—the backlog of thousands of cases is clearly unsustainable and there are real problems with the Court being used much too freely—the campaigners for these Russian human rights defenders have expressed concern that the type of language and rhetoric that we are using about the ECHR is remarkably similar to that being used in Russia. We must guard against giving domestic Governments too much power to decide which cases go forward to the ECHR, because we may actually see cases such as those of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev being caught in that trap. Those cases are in that queue of thousands of cases that are waiting to be heard at the ECHR.

I will very briefly discuss human rights in China, as I can see, Mr Rosindell, that you are getting a little impatient. I want to draw attention to the situation in Tibet, and the three deaths and the continuing disturbances there. They have resulted from what seems to be an increasing denial of human rights, particularly religious rights, in that part of China. It is very unhelpful for the Chinese Government routinely to condemn secessionist groups, because the current elected administration-in-exile of Tibet is not actually calling for secession any more but looking for peaceful dialogue, and that opportunity should not be lost.

In the case of both China and Russia, however, there are some hopeful signs. Both countries are now more open societies than they were in the past. In the case of China, it is maintaining the “one country, two systems” approach to Hong Kong and actually tolerating a very free society there, but it has a myopia about human rights worldwide and is implicated in supporting some fairly unpleasant regimes around the world. Also, although China and Russia went along with action on Libya, their failure to support a firm UN resolution on Syria does neither country any justice.

There are many brave human rights defenders around the world who look to the British Government for leadership. I hope that we will continue to provide leadership and that we will perhaps even go further, as the Select Committee has recommended.