argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe: Forced Confession — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: International Affairs
David Lindon Lammy (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for granting the urgent question, and I think that the whole House is hugely grateful for the tenacity of my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) It is right that the whole House celebrated when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was finally released after four and a half years in unlawful and cruel detention by the Iranian authorities, but it remains the case that this Government, and particularly the Prime Minister, have serious questions to answer over their gross mishandling of the detention of her and other British nationals in Iran. Nazanin said herself that the Prime Minister’s mistakes had had a "lasting impact", and that she had "lived in the shadow" of them for four and a half years We recognise the sensitive and difficult negotiations that led to the agreement for Nazanin’s release, but it is incredibly concerning that she was forced to sign a last-minute false confession as a condition of her release. Did the UK Government agree to that condition, and if so, was it the Foreign Secretary or another official who signed it off? What is the Government’s assessment of how the confession could be used by the Iranian Government against Nazanin in the future The Government must also answer the questions about their failure to secure the release of the British-Iranian Morad Tahbaz, who remains languishing in an Iranian jail. Tahbaz’s family were repeatedly told by senior politicians and officials at the Foreign Office that he would be included in any release deal, but that clearly did not happen. In the House on Wednesday 16 March, when I asked the Foreign Secretary about Tahbaz’s case, she said: "we have secured his release on furlough. He is now at home."—[Official Report, 16 March 2022; Vol. 710, c. 945.] However, Tahbaz’s family have made it clear that that is untrue. He was released for a mere 48 hours, and has since been returned to the "abhorrent and appalling" conditions of prison It is shameful that Iran continues to use Tahbaz as a pawn. I wrote to the Foreign Secretary about it, and I received a response this morning. I thank her for that response—received within the last hour—but we must have transparency. Can the Minister tell us why Morad Tahbaz has not been able to return home to the UK alongside Nazanin and Anoosheh Ashoori, as his family were promised? What progress is being made on securing Tahbaz’s release, and what progress has there been on securing his release to the UK, as was privately promised? Finally, what progress is being made on securing a visa for his wife to end the current travel ban?
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe: Forced Confession — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: International Affairs
Rachael Helen Maskell (Labour, Centre-left): Although the Iranian regime is fully responsible for the plights of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori over the past six years, it is clear that the actions of the Foreign Office have not helped on many steps of their journey. Can we therefore have an independent inquiry into the actions and inactions of the Foreign Office that have hindered much of the progress that needed to be made?
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe: Forced Confession — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: International Affairs
Fleur Anderson (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister has been asked this question twice, so I will try for a third time. Did the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister personally authorise UK officials to advise Nazanin to sign the forced confession at the airport in the way she has described, or was that decision taken by officials without their knowledge?
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe: Forced Confession — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: International Affairs
Andrew Francis Slaughter (Labour, Centre-left): In 2017, the Prime Minister said that Nazanin was teaching people journalism in Iran. She now says that she lived in the shadow of his words for the rest of her time in prison. He has never retracted those words, and he has never apologised for the harm he personally caused Nazanin and her family. Can the Minister tell us why?
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Anthony Joseph Lloyd (Labour, Centre-left): Like the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), I have met many victims of the violence and the loved ones of those who died. They still want the Stormont House agreement to be implemented. The Secretary of State has to account for this. The civil proceedings on the Ormeau Road events revealed a lot of detail, as did the Kingsmill and Ballymurphy inquests. They all revealed truths that had not been known. What the Secretary of State describes as an adversarial approach to seeking justice actually works. This will disappear and he has to account for that.
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is indeed pre-empting the remaining parts of my speech, which I will get on to as quickly as I can. He is free to catch my eye at that point, as he raises an incredibly important point What we needed from the Government in the run-up to this process was empathy. That requires listening and real care in the face of the most terrible tragedies. Let us take the case of John Molloy. John was walking home in north Belfast in 1996 when he was stabbed to death in a brutal sectarian attack. He was just 18 years old. John’s mother Linda wanted me to put her response to the Bill on the record: "Why is John’s sectarian murder in Belfast different from a racially motivated murder in London? If this legislation gets through whoever murdered John could simply get away with it. It is just wrong that perpetrators will be able to get on with their lives officially, given amnesty by the state, while we are left to cope with the devastation. We brought our children up to believe in law and order and it is so wrong that the rule of law can be overridden in this way. The hurt never goes away."
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. We are not talking about whether we want to move forward or not; the important thing is that we move forward in the right way Investigations are absolutely central to families being able to move forward and to the ability to deliver justice. The hon. Gentleman will notice from the Bill, which I am sure he has read in great detail, that the word "investigations" is mostly replaced by "review". The emphasis that has proven successful in the past—from the Stormont agreement right through to the ongoing Kenova investigations—has provided, in limited circumstances, the kind of reconciliation, truth and justice that victims have requested. That is where we believe the future should be Currently, there are 32 files with the prosecution service of Northern Ireland as a result of the Kenova investigations. Not one has been picked up, because the prosecution service does not have the resources. There has been progress, and I am sure that the justice that we are talking about could be dispensed if the prosecution service of Northern Ireland had the right resources.
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): The alternative, clearly, was in the Stormont House agreement. Plus there is the additional learning from Jon Boutcher’s work on the Kenova investigations and inquiries, and the real desire among victims to make progress Of course victims are realistic about the chances of prosecution in some cases—what a lot of them want is often quite different—but the great thing that I have seen from talking to families who have been subject to investigations by Jon Boutcher under the Kenova system has been how it has been tailored and sensitive to the needs of victims, while being realistic about the prospects of prosecution.
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): My party will be voting against this Bill today because of the equivalence it makes between people who served in the armed forces and those who committed acts of terror and because of the incredibly low threshold. We should remember that 722 service people lost their lives by acts of terror, and the people who committed those acts—against our armed forces—could get immunity from prosecution with the very lowest possible threshold. That is what we will be voting against today. A better process would start by listening, rather than forcing solutions on people.
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): I have been very clear: I want to make sure that the rights of victims and veterans are equal to the rights of terrorists and people who committed crime in the era of the troubles. This Bill does not achieve that. Proper scrutiny and proper preparation would have delivered a Bill that did.
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): I am going to make progress. The provisions of this Bill will also have the independent commission carrying out so-called reviews into deaths and serious injury. The Bill provides that the independent commission officers can be designated as having police powers. However, it is unclear when or how such powers are to be exercised, nor is it clear whether the reviews that the independent commission carries out will in fact uncover any new information. In the additional notes to the Bill, the Government set out their view that "for the ICRIR to conduct successful information recovery investigations, which will in turn significantly aid reconciliation in the long term, it is essential for the possibility of a prosecution outcome to be restricted to those who fail to participate effectively in the truth recovery process." We have concerns about how much truth will come from this immunity scheme. Immunity will be retained even in circumstances where the account given is deemed as being truthful by the perpetrator themselves, but is subsequently found not to be in accordance with the accepted historical account. The immunity requests panel is also not obliged to seek information from anyone other than the person coming forward in order to verify the truth of the perpetrator’s account. It comes back to the point I made earlier about the lack of investigatory work going on beforehand—it should be leading the process I again put on record how this Bill is affecting victims whose loved ones were killed by terrorists. Jean Caldwell’s husband Cecil was one of eight workmen killed by an IRA landmine in Teebane in January 1992. Today, Jean says: "I want justice. All this talk of amnesty has brought it all back to the fore again. What will they"— the IRA bombers— "tell that will be of any benefit to me? It’s so deeply unfair. My blood runs cold. There is no ‘amnesty’ for victims".
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): I think the hon. Gentleman needs to read the Bill for himself. There are circumstances in which people have committed rape and other crimes and the whole lot would be subject to immunity. These are things that we have taken advice on before saying them here in the Commons today and that are now accepted by a great number of people with a prosecutorial background who have studied this area. They are absolutely clear that this Bill does not contain the right measures. At no point in the Bill is there an exemption for people who have committed sexual crimes, and that is something the hon. Gentleman should look for. If he can point to a line in this Bill where sexual offences and rape are excluded from immunity, I look forward to seeing it The Bill also contains the laudable aims of establishing oral history, memorialisation and academic research on the conflict, but it is the Secretary of State who will decide the designated persons to take forward the programme. There is also a more fundamental issue that with such widespread opposition to this Bill from victims and survivors, there is a danger they will refuse to participate in any historical projects that come from it.
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: International Affairs
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): I will make a bit of progress. On these Benches, we wanted to work with the Government to find a way forward on legacy issues, but the Government’s approach is to bulldoze their plans through without addressing the needs of victims and survivors. Alternative options, such as Operation Kenova, have shown that there is a way to handle legacy issues in a sensitive manner that delivers for victims, the security forces and wider society. The Government have the numbers to get this Bill through today, but I urge Ministers to reflect on what has been and will be said in the Chamber today and the reaction that this Bill has received on the island of Ireland. Reconciliation is difficult, and as the peace process has shown us, it requires compromise. This Bill is uncompromising and therefore has lost the legitimacy that it could have had.
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Anthony Joseph Lloyd (Labour, Centre-left): I hope that the remarks made by the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) will echo not simply around the Chamber but around these islands. The tone that he struck was the one that I wish to see, and I wish—I do not mean this personally—that it were the one coming from the Government. His points about reconciliation are absolutely fundamental. Like many hon. Members, I have met many victims of the violence and the loved ones of those who were killed, and it is hard to listen to victims without recognising their tremendous hurt and how that will continue to be there. They need to go through the knowledge process, which is so fundamental to their own ability not to reconcile—in a way, it is a very difficult thing to lose a loved one—but at least to accept that the state, as the arbiter of these things, has made every conceivable effort to ensure that their pain is recognised and moved through I can think of no victims who will be satisfied by the Bill. The Secretary of State cannot say that any of them are in favour of this piece of legislation, nor did he even try to suggest it. Many of the victims would say to me that the two-year limitation of sentences is already a betrayal of what they seek, and I have genuine sympathy with that. We can almost certainly balance that with the fact that the process led to peace. Different people have different views on that, but, nevertheless, even with that two-year sentence limitation, it is not about the magnitude of the sentence; it is about recognition that somebody has been held to account for the crimes that took their loved ones away or changed their individual lives. That is so important Do we have a victim-centred process before us? The answer is, simply, no. I really regret that. Yes, it is an improvement on the absolutism of the amnesty that we had before us only a few months ago, but it is only a very limited improvement. In any case, in five years’ time, we will have a de facto amnesty. In the short-term, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) pointed out, because of the very low bar on granting immunity, it is nearly certain that the amnesty will become the de facto process that applies I have to say to Conservative Members who campaign for the rights of veterans that it is worth reflecting on the over 700 veterans who died during the conflict, because they, as victims, also have rights. I think the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) made exactly that point about those with whom he had served in the UDR, and we can take that across different parts of our armed forces.
Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-05-24
Topic: Law and Crime
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): This is a very serious issue and it would be great to clarify this. The model bill team on Queen’s University Belfast’s committee on the administration of justice, who are experts in this area, have said: "Unusually for such an immunity scheme, there is no specific prohibition on certain kinds of crime, such as crimes of sexual violence. It would therefore appear that applicants who had been involved in rape and other crimes of sexual violence related to the Troubles, or indeed the covering up of such crimes within paramilitary or state organisations, would be entitled to apply for immunity under this bill." So this is not just about serious violence. If people who had committed serious violence and rape applied for immunity, would it apply in these circumstances? Let’s just clear this up.
Energy Price Cap — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Energy
Alan Patrick Vincent Whitehead (Labour, Centre-left): It would be really nice if the Secretary of State told us when the ECO4 legislation is coming, because ECO4 is not going to work unless that legislation comes forward The Secretary of State knows that the new price cap and the increase in customer bills will have a devastating impact on customers’ struggle with the cost of living, so why is his Department directly contributing to the sky-high price cap levels by putting into place new customer levies—such as the socialisation of the costs of failed energy companies, the green gas levy and the nuclear regulated asset base levy—that will add perhaps £100 to the upcoming and future price cap levels, and hence to customer bills? The Secretary of State talks of Government assistance to help customers to cope with their bills, but is it not very much about giving with one hand and taking back with the other? Should customers not be angry at this cynical policy?
New Low-Carbon Technologies — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Energy
Darren Paul Jones (Labour, Centre-left): Yesterday, a Treasury Minister was unable to confirm whether the climate compatibility checkpoint would be applied to the recent tax cut for the oil and gas industry investing in further drilling. Can the Minister today confirm whether that climate checkpoint will apply to existing investment decisions and not just future investment decisions after the checkpoint has been introduced?
New Low-Carbon Technologies — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Environment
Margaret Olivia Hillier (Labour, Centre-left): A recent Public Accounts Committee report on net zero highlighted the real challenge of getting consumers onboard. Going net zero and embracing low- carbon technologies cannot be a preserve of the wealthiest and there needs to be much more work by Government. What are the Government doing to ensure that consumers are supported to make green choices?
New Low-Carbon Technologies — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Energy
Geraint Richard Davies (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister may know that our gas pipes are capable of taking 40% hydrogen, as they did with coal gas. Will he meet me and also Professor Andrew Barron who works at Swansea University, which is pushing forward technology to take the hydrogen produced by renewable wind farms off peak, converting it and putting it into the gas grid and therefore reducing the carbon footprint of boiling an egg by 40%. Surely that is the best way forward in the short term to reduce our carbon footprint.
Apprenticeship Levy — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Labor
Barry John Sheerman (Labour, Centre-left): We are trying to find out this morning what the Secretary of State’s job is. It says "Industrial Strategy", but how can we have an industrial strategy without skills? The Minister knows that something is seriously wrong with the apprenticeship levy—and what about kickstart? That has quietly died the death. It was the flagship training policy of this country. What the hell is going on on the Government Benches if they do not know what their job is?
Leaving the EU: Benefit for Businesses — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Technology
Chinyelu Susan Onwurah (Labour, Centre-left): British business depends on British science for long-term national growth, and the No. 1 issue facing British scientists right now is our participation in the world’s largest science funding programme—the European Union’s £95 billion Horizon programme. Since 2007, British scientists have won over £14 billion from Horizon—more than we put in—but this is about more than money; it concerns international prestige. Horizon is a collaborative network of over 30 countries. Let us face it: this Government will never be able to replicate that. The Prime Minister said that he had an oven-ready Brexit deal; why is British science being left on the shelf?
Business Investment — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Macroeconomics
Seema Malhotra-Saluja (Labour, Centre-left): The Centre for Policy Studies is not alone in having just published damning research from business leaders. It states that Britain is becoming a less attractive place to invest; the UK is slipping behind other countries because of red tape, rising taxes and ministerial complacency. Could it be because we have a chaotic, rudderless, high-tax Conservative Government, with no industrial strategy and no plan for growth? Is it not time that the Secretary of State listened to businesses, tackled rising business costs and backed calls to spike the national insurance hike? He should know that it is the wrong tax at the wrong time.
Affordable Energy: Winter 2022-23 — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Energy
Judith Mary Cummins (Labour, Centre-left): Two weeks ago, we found out that we have a huge surplus of national gas but nowhere to store it. That was swiftly followed by the announcement that as many as 6 million households face power cuts this winter because of gas shortages. Will the Minister give a guarantee today that this Government can keep the lights on for both households and industry this winter? A business in my constituency told me that its energy bills have soared from £7 million to £35 million. What support are the Government giving to those energy-intensive industries?
Neonatal Leave and Pay — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Labor
Justin Piers Richard Madders (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister says "when parliamentary time allows", but the Government could have provided time by putting an employment Bill in the Queen’s Speech. On neonatal pay, flexible working and an enforcement body to protect workers’ rights, this Government promise a lot but deliver very little. Ministers have promised an employment Bill over 20 times, yet it still appears nowhere in the legislative programme. Is not the only job that this Government are interested in protecting the Prime Minister’s?
Energy Efficiency: Domestic Buildings — House of Commons, 2022-06-07
Topic: Energy
Paul Christopher Blomfield (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister knows that reducing consumption is vital to households and to the country, but back in 2013 the Conservative-led Government cut energy efficiency programmes, which led to a 92% fall in home insulation; and the flagship green homes grant scheme was scrapped as a failure just six months after its launch. When will the Government commit to the ambitious programme of retro-insulation that we need if we are to cut emissions, slash family bills, reduce gas imports and create thousands of jobs?