Oral Answers to Questions

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con) [V]]

Mr Speaker, thank you very much for calling me. The line from Kent is pretty terrible, I am afraid, but that is a complaint for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

Today, on Eid al-Adha, will the Foreign Secretary join me in welcoming the number of Muslim communities in the UK who have come from abroad to make their lives here, but will he also reach out to Muslim communities around the world and ask them to stand with the people of Xinjiang, who this year will not be celebrating—as, indeed, they have not been celebrating for many years—under the rule of the Chinese Communist party and the authoritarian dictatorship that it has caused?

[Dominic Raab]

I thank my hon. Friend, and he is absolutely right. We celebrate the role of all communities and all religions in this country: they make Britain what it is. He is absolutely right to say—I regularly raise it with my colleagues and opposite numbers overseas—that particularly in Muslim-majority countries it seems there is not quite as much concern as in the UK and other western, non-Muslim-majority countries about human rights abuses. This is an actor-agnostic issue; it is merely about treatment—persecution—based on religion, creed or ethnicity. We call on all countries to uphold those basic values, but particularly those most directly affected with the victims in Xinjiang.