Uyghur Tribunal Judgment — House of Commons, 2022-01-20
Topic: Mixed Topics
Nusrat Munir Ul-Ghani (Conservative, Centre-right): I do agree with the hon. Gentleman. Our constituents want to know the heritage of the products that they are consuming, quite apart from the environmental impact. There is nothing to prevent the Government from ensuring that these products are labelled "stained with slave labour from Xinjiang" The tribunal spent a year, in London, amassing the most comprehensive body of evidence in existence on the Uyghur crisis. It took testimonies from academics, legislators and witnesses, and that is how it was able to make a legal determination. There was evidence of, for example, a massive drop in Uyghur birth rates in Xinjiang, which represents just one of the five markers of genocide. In one Uyghur region, birth rates are down by 84%. That accords neatly with the marker: the destruction of a people by stopping them having children, in just one generation. The tribunal labelled it "the biological genocide" Nowhere else in the world are so many women being violated in one place at the same time. Although the Uyghur region accounts for just 1.8% of China’s population, 80% of all birth control device insertions in China were performed in that region. Is the Minister really going to challenge the evidence with which the tribunal was presented? It heard that: "Pregnant women, in detention centres and outside, were forced to have abortions even at the very last stages of pregnancy. In the course of attempted abortions babies were sometimes born alive but then killed." Those are the facts that were presented to the tribunal Witnesses’ testimonies were so horrific that I cannot list them all, but the Board of Deputies of British Jews compared this to the holocaust. Its president, Marie van der Zyl, wrote: "Nobody could…fail to notice the similarities between what is alleged to be happening in the People’s Republic of China today and what happened in Nazi Germany 75 years ago" Having considered this evidence, the tribunal said that it was "satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the PRC, by the imposition of measures to prevent births intended to destroy a significant part of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as such, has committed genocide." I urge the Minister not to maintain the Government’s position of "Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil". That is straight out of the CCP’s playbook. We have moved on, and the Government must now act. I am going to give the Minister some time in which to consider rewriting her speech, because the Government have now been told of the ICJ’s 2007 ruling, and we do not want to hear a rehearsal of their previous arguments Let me try to help the Minister by pre-empting some of the points that she may make. In the past, the Government have deferred to their holding statement that this is a matter for competent courts. That is irrelevant to today’s debate. The House now knows that the ICJ’s Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro 2007 ruling has blown that argument out of the water. Let me say it again: countries have a "duty to act...at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of. the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed." That duty has long been triggered. When the Minister recently praised the tribunal for "building international awareness and understanding of the human rights violations occurring in Xinjiang", that triggered the duty to act. Not only that, but when she "urged the Chinese Government to engage with the evidence provided by the Uyghur Tribunal" during a recent meeting with the Chinese ambassador, that triggered the duty to act. So does she agree with the ICJ ruling and agree that it is the duty of Governments, not courts, to continually assess whether there is a risk of genocide? Is she today going to change Government policy?