London, ( Parliament Politice Magazine ) – The valiant attempts of the Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, both to give the ultimate atrocity crimes a name and to craft an internationally agreed instrument to prevent such crimes from endlessly recurring, gave birth to the 1948 Genocide Convention.
More than 40 of Lemkin’s own family had been murdered in the Holocaust but even before those infamies he had made a careful study of the Armenian and Assyrian genocides (in which more than 1.5 million people had perished). Lemkin’s passion was derived from first-hand knowledge and suffering.
In its various iterations and modifications, the 1948 Convention broadly lays duties on its signatories to predict impending genocides; to prevent them; to protect the victims; and to punish the perpetrators.
Just utter words like Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Yezidis, Rohingya and Uyghurs – or consider events unfolding in Tigray or Northern Nigeria – and it becomes very clear that the road to hell is paved with the Convention’s good intentions.
In 2015, with colleagues from across the House, I raised the plight of the Yezidi and Christian minorities in northern Iraq and in 2019 travelled there to take first-hand testimonies and accounts.
Finally, just a few weeks ago, thanks to the work of Amal Clooney, and other lawyers, a German domestic court convicted one of the ISIS insurgents for the crime of genocide.
The UK still has not named it as genocide (and more than a century later still declines to even name the Armenian atrocities as genocide).
So, we shouldn’t be surprised that it has refused to do so in the case of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang – subject to appalling atrocities, incarceration, and depredations.
Despite the findings of the Independent Uyghur Tribunal, chaired by the illustrious Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, that genocide is underway– the Foreign Office refuses to agree (even though the Foreign Secretary, Elizabeth Truss MP and the UK House of Commons says that it is).
The failure to give the crime the name it warrants emaciates the provisions of Lemkin’s Genocide Convention and enables those who have signed up to the Convention to turn a blind eye.
Foreign Office officials simply trot out the hackneyed line that such determinations may only be made by the Courts – knowing that Chinese and Russian vetoes will stop referrals via the UN Security Council to the International Criminal Court while our own High Court has not been given the powers to make such a determination.
Both Elizabeth Truss and Boris Johnson agree with me that this must be reformed.
My Private Members’ Bill – which offers a route to the High Court – provides an opportunity for the reform to go ahead.
The Genocide Determination Bill provides for two important mechanisms: first, genocide determination, and second, specific responses engaging international actors.
In relation to genocide determination, it expands upon Section 3 of the Trade Act 2021 to ensure that this determination is not limited to countries with future free trade agreements. That was a very modest Government response to the all-party amendments to the Trade Act which I and Sir Iain Duncan Smith promoted in 2021. But where there is no free trade deal in the offing (for instance, as with China) it is a provision that cannot be used to have the evidence of genocide against the Uyghurs tested (even by a Committee of parliamentarians).
By contrast, the Bill will give victims of genocide the power to lay their evidence before the High Court and for it make a preliminary determination – or to find, if appropriate, that the offences amount instead to the lesser, but still grave, level of crimes against humanity or war crimes. That distinction is currently a very real issue in Ukraine.
The Bill requires the Secretary of State to follow up with specific steps engaging international actors – including the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court – ensuring that the determination is followed by decisive action.
In 2019, Jeremy Hunt MP, then Foreign Secretary, commissioned the Truro Review of global persecution of Christians. In his findings, the Bishop of Truro, the Rt Revd Philip Mounstephen, cited examples of genocide, identified flaws in the Government’s approach to genocide and, in Recommendation 7, called for reform. All his recommendations were accepted by the Government.
A formal review of his recommendations was stipulated for 2022 and is currently underway.
In the intervening period, the approach to genocide has not noticeably changed and recommendation 7 remains unimplemented. Even worse, unlike the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, Foreign Office officials endlessly repeat the same mantra that the approach is comprehensive and in line with international obligations.
However, the support for reform voiced by their political bosses, the pressure of the Truro Review, this all-party Private Members’ Bill, and the desultory failure to effectively tackle the crime above all crimes, means that there is a real opportunity to finally make a reality of Lemkin’s attempts to force Governments to do more than sign up to a Convention to which they currently pay lip service.
Genocide does not happen overnight; it is a crime that is preventable – so long as we understand our obligations and act upon them. We owe it to victims of past and present genocides to do nothing less. Our failure has led to terrible crimes and to too many perpetrators getting away with genocide.
David Alton
Lord Alton of Liverpool is a Crossbench Peer and a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on International relations and Defence – www.davidalton.net @DavidAltonHL