Uyghur Tribunal Judgment — House of Commons, 2022-01-20
Topic: International Affairs
George Iain Duncan Smith (Conservative, Centre-right): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani) on securing this debate. She spoke brilliantly about what the issues were and laid them out in some detail. I will touch on a few of those but many others will deal with them in more detail I say from the outset that the whole issue and the plight of the Uyghurs should trouble us not just because people are now being persecuted, executed, put into forced labour and sterilised. Those alone are enough to make us in this House, of all Houses around the world, stand up and say, "Enough." But this is also about the wider concept: the more that China—the Chinese Government—gets away with doing this and the more that Governments turn their heads when confronted with the problems of calling it out, the more the Chinese Government extend their reach and form of despotic government around the world. We have seen what their purpose is: to countermand the idea of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. They have made that very clear. At every stage, they think that what we do, what we believe in, is weakness and therefore they sell their concept to and impose it on others What is happening to the Uyghurs is a huge wake-up call to those of us in the free world who believe substantially in the concept of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, because it is being eroded even as we hold this debate. We cannot assume, as we legitimately did early after the end of the cold war, that we had somehow won this battle and that it was therefore likely that every other country would have to embrace these principles. They do not. We have to fight for them The point about the debate—this is why I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden so much on having managed to secure it—is that we need to be able to say to our Government, my Government, that they need to be at the forefront and leading on tackling this challenge, not dragged along behind. To be fair to the Government on the Uyghur problem and China in general, they are not alone. Countries across Europe also simply will not admit that there is a problem; Germany has been dragging its feet on this for ages. However, that does not excuse us, because other countries, such as Australia, Canada and the United States, have now all decided that the issue is clear If we cannot decide on this, what can we decide? As my hon. Friend pointed out, the tribunal made it very clear. It was a properly constituted tribunal. The Government say it has to be a proper court. It is not a court of law, but the tribunal was constituted correctly and as would be done at the UN. The phrase it used, which is critical, is that it found "beyond reasonable doubt" that the Chinese Government are perpetrating genocide, crimes against humanity and torture against the Uyghurs. It is surely only reasonable that we urge the Government to do the next thing. Instead of arguing about whether the tribunal is a proper court, if the Government themselves suspect at any stage that such things are happening, it is essentially inherent on them, given the 1948 issue, to pursue this and to urgently assess whether they consider the Uyghurs to be at serious risk of genocide. I am happy to take an intervention from my hon. Friend the Minister on this, because we may need to satisfy ourselves that it is within the power of the Government to do that. It is. The Government can do anything that this House wishes them to, and this is also internationally legal Will the Minister respond on why the Government simply do not want to do this? We had debates here and tried to amend the Bill three or four times, and we came pretty close, I have to say. However, the reality is that I am not even asking the Government to declare this a genocide. I simply ask them to make this urgent assessment and to follow the evidence of what they find, following the tribunal and all the other areas of information. I ask the Government to start that process, that is all. I am not asking them to reach a conclusion at this particular point. I just want them to start the process. That seems very small.