Human Rights Abuses and Corruption: UK Sanctions — House of Commons, 2022-07-21
Topic: International Affairs
Christopher John Bryant (Labour, Centre-left): The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) and I are tango partners in this—or a tag team, perhaps, depending on which way you want to look at it. I endorse everything he said at the beginning of his speech, but I will start with Iran This year, Nazanin Zaghari-Radcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, two British citizens, were finally allowed to return to the UK following years of detention and serious human rights abuses in Iran. Those responsible for these abuses are yet to be held accountable and they continue to persecute innocent people, holding them hostage for political gain. In September last year, the FCDO received detailed evidence on 10 individuals involved in state hostage taking and related serious human rights violations that we are also investigating in the Foreign Affairs Committee. In December last year, we named three of those perpetrators during a Westminster Hall debate, as has been mentioned. The FCDO has still failed to take any action in relation to those three people, and that is a mystery to me In the wake of this inaction, a number of those individuals known to the FCDO played a key role in the ongoing mistreatment of British citizens, including Nazanin—in particular, Ameneh Sadat Zabihpour, a reporter with state-controlled Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, who is known for eliciting forced confessions from prisoners in front of camera during interrogations. This is exactly the opposite of what a free media is all about. I understand that she was present at the airport prior to Nazanin’s release, attempting to interview and film her while she was being pressured to confess by the Iranian Government. The second person is Hossein Taeb, the former head of the intelligence operation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Under him, the IRGC intelligence ran the notorious Section 2A of Evin prison. He was responsible for the mass arrest and torture of hundreds of prisoners and was the driving force behind the IRGC’s hostage taking. I understand that Taeb was instrumental in the continued detention of British citizens, and that his officers enforced the forced, and therefore fake, last-minute confession from Nazanin and subsequently blocked the furlough of other British nationals in defiance of what had been agreed with the United Kingdom If the UK had taken action on those individuals last September, or in December when we called for it, they might have thought twice about continuing to abuse British hostages today. As we have seen, Government inaction, I am afraid, always has a cost. The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green referred to Hong Kong. How many times have we called for the sanctioning of Carrie Lam? She has been sanctioned by the United States of America, but not by us. We are the country with the closest relationship with Hong Kong. What about Chris Tang, Stephen Lo, John Lee Ka-chiu, Teresa Cheng, Erick Tsang, Xia Baolong, Zhang Xiaoming, Luo Huining, Zheng Yanxiong and Eric Chan? They should all be on the British sanction list, but they are on the US list. It is crazy Let me go to Russia—not physically, although I am not sanctioned, oddly enough, but I do not think I would be safe, unlike some other Members. I want to speak about one particular person, who will be known to quite a lot of Members of this House and of the other place. Vladimir Kara-Murza is one of the bravest people I have ever met in politics. He is a British citizen, although originally from Russia. He is currently detained for speaking out against the war in Ukraine. He has been designated as a foreign agent due to his work with international NGOs and his advocacy of Magnitsky sanctions. He is one of the thousands of political prisoners in Russia who have been subject to serious human rights violations. They move him from prison to prison, and nobody has proper access to him I have no idea whether the FCDO is taking a proactive enough role in ensuring that Kara-Murza has proper consular support, but I know that the FCDO has received detailed evidence on the following individuals responsible for such persecution. Andrey Yuryevich Lipov, the head of Roskomnadzor—easy for you to say, Madam Deputy Speaker—is the Kremlin’s chief censor. He has been instrumental in restricting Russian citizens’ access to reliable information about the war in Ukraine and contributed to the arbitrary detention of citizens based on their online activity. He has recently been sanctioned by the EU, but not by the UK Konstantin Anatolyevich Chuychenko, the Minister of Justice and a member of the Security Council of Russia, bears ultimate responsibility for the implementation of the foreign agents and undesirable or extremist organisations lists used to suppress opponents and critics of the war in Ukraine. He has been sanctioned by the US and Canada, but not by the UK—there is a theme here. Then there is Oleg Mikhailovich Sviridenko, the Deputy Minister of Justice under Chuychenko. He is responsible for implementing the foreign agents law. Much like Chuychenko, he plays a key role in the suppression of opponents and critics of Russia’s war in Ukraine I mention all those names because there is a context: the authoritarian regimes around the world are a serious threat not only to our values in the west, but to our way of life. It is not just about Russia and China, although of course they are often key state actors; it is also, I would argue, about Saudi Arabia It is great to be starting a possible trade deal with the Gulf states, but we must ensure that we respect human rights and bring such issues forward throughout the process. After all, how is Saudi Arabia not an authoritarian regime when it executes 81 people in one day and invites a Saudi journalist to an embassy in somebody else’s country, kills him and dismembers him on the instructions of the Saudi leadership? We have to be very careful how we tread, because there is no point running away from one authoritarian regime, Russia or China, into the hands of another The tentacles of authoritarianism are very lengthy, including the dirty money in the City of London. There were 14 strategic lawsuits against public participation in 2021, but only two in 2019 and 2020, so this is a growing problem in the UK. I warmly welcome the fact that the Ministry of Justice said this week that it will cap costs on lawyers and introduce a three-part test to strike out meritless cases, but we need to go much further. The one thing I would beg of the Minister is to have a proper parliamentary process so we can defend our values and tackle human rights abuses and corruption in authoritarian regimes around the world.