I have spoken to colleagues who have just returned from Kyiv—they were attending events to mark the second anniversary of the war—and they report that, at this critical time, Ukraine needs our help now every bit as much as it did on the day Putin attacked. First and foremost, we must guard against complacency. We cannot let the Ukrainian people down simply because we lose interest, because if Ukraine loses, we all lose.
I very much welcome the UK Government’s financial and military support package and the new €50 billion multi-year funding package from the European Union, as well as the fact that Germany has committed to doubling its military aid. I share the Minister’s hope that many of Ukraine’s allies will now follow that lead, most notably the United States. Its prevarication has surely only emboldened Ukraine’s enemies and depressed the Ukrainian people further.
However, there is still so much we can do. I take the Minister’s point about the sanctions regime, but what about using frozen Russian assets to assist Putin’s war victims, most notably the £2 billion sitting in a London bank two years on from the sale of Chelsea football club? As we look ahead, has the FCDO’s atrocity prevention monitoring body been keeping track of breaches of international law and war crimes being committed by Russia in Ukraine? With a marked increase in the targeting of civilians in Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Lviv, are the UK Government preparing a case for the International Criminal Court against Russia for the deliberate targeting and bombardment of civilians in Ukraine?
]]>Throughout this unimaginable horror, the UK continues to profit from the carnage by selling weapons to Israel. Shamefully, there has been no real desire or attempt from the UK to make the slaughter stop. The Government seem happy to continue providing tacit support for this illegal occupation, this systematic decades-long oppression and persecution, and now the ethnic cleansing and collective punishment that goes with it.
If and when we get a US deal to the UN, what action will the UK Government take? Voting for a ceasefire cannot happen in isolation. Will the UK Government stop selling weapons to Israel? Will they finally get behind the International Court of Justice investigation? Will they fund, as they did quite rightly in the case of Ukraine, an International Criminal Court investigation of Israel’s prosecution of this conflict? Whatever happens, Minister, this sorry episode will be remembered for being one of the most shameful in the history of British foreign policy, because we have witnessed a complete dereliction of all moral and legal responsibility from a Government and a Parliament that, at the time of greatest humanitarian crisis, have simply looked the other way. Quite rightly, history will judge them harshly for it.
]]>All the organisations, individuals and churches that I listed will not ignore the evidence of their own eyes. Nor will they turn a deaf ear to the cries of suffering Palestinians. Neither should we. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote that
“in silence we become accomplices, but…when we speak every word has the power to change the world.”
As I bring my remarks to a close, I want to share with the House the words of those being forced to live through this hell every single day. Thirty-year-old Islam Harb lost three of his four children, along with his mother, two of his sisters and both his brothers when a missile hit their home. Islam said:
“my family spent days trying to dig the remains of the dead out of the rubble. The body of my brother Khalil was found 200m away from the house due to the power of the strike, in pieces. My children’s small bodies were torn to pieces.”
His surviving sister, Ahlam, added:
“My brother Mohammed…was only recognized by his hair; nothing was left of my brother Khalil except his hand”.
Thirty-year-old Ahmad Nasman, a physiotherapist in Gaza, lost his wife and their three children, aged five, four, and just three months, along with both of his parents and his sister when a missile hit their home. He said it took him four days to retrieve the body of his baby daughter Ayla from the rubble; she was only recognised by the clothes she was wearing. The same blast decapitated his five-year-old daughter, Arwa. He said:
“When the war started, I had only one mission in my life, to protect my children. I wish I were with them when the house was hit…My body survived but my spirit died with my children, it was crushed under the rubble with them.”
That is why tonight really matters. That is why it will be times like these for which we are all remembered. We will be remembered for what we did, or for what we chose not to do. Decades hence, people will say to us, “You were there,” and they will ask us, “What did you do?” Some will have to say that they chose to engage in a debate on semantics over “sustainable” or “humanitarian” pauses, while others will say that they chose to give Netanyahu both the weapons and the political cover that he required to prosecute his relentless war. But some of us in this House will be able to say that when we saw 30,000 innocent people killed, when we saw almost 100,000 innocent people injured, when we saw tens of thousands of traumatised children with physical and mental damage that will last for the rest of their lives, when we saw 2 million people displaced from their homes, when we saw refugee camps bombed, when we saw hundreds of journalists killed, when we saw hospitals reduced to rubble, when we saw places of worship and the people sheltering in them attacked, and when we saw ambulances that had been sent to rescue children being hit by missiles, with those rescued children still inside—at that point, we will say that we chose to do everything that we possibly could to make it stop.
We will also say that we chose to listen. We listened to the International Court of Justice when it determined that there were plausible grounds that Israel is in the process of committing genocide. We listened to the anguished pleas of innocent Palestinians begging for our help to make it stop. We listened to the anger of millions of people from across these islands. And then we used our immensely privileged position as Members of this House to demand an immediate ceasefire.
By supporting the SNP’s motion calling for that immediate ceasefire, this House can put itself on the side of peace, it can put itself on the side of justice, it can put itself on the side of the people, and it can put itself on the right side of history. [Applause.]
]]>An immediate ceasefire has already been endorsed by Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Archbishop of York, Scotland’s Catholic bishops, the Catholic bishops’ conference of England and Wales, the Church of England’s House of Bishops, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Quakers, the leaders of the Methodists and the United Reformed Church, the Lutheran World Federation, the UN Secretary-General, the UN General Assembly President, UNICEF, the World Food Programme, the World Health Organisation, Save the Children, Amnesty, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, ActionAid, the International Rescue Committee, Action Against Hunger, the Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere, Medical Aid for Palestinians, the Council for Arab-British Understanding, the Balfour Project, Islamic Relief, Christian Aid, War on Want, the Carter Centre, War Child, Unite the union, Unison, the King Centre, World Vision, WaterAid, Tearfund, Street Child, Start Network, Peace Direct, Mercy Corps, CIVICUS, and scores and scores more churches, non-governmental organisations, charities and individuals who have seen Israel completely abandon international humanitarian law by imposing collective punishment on a defenceless civilian population. [Interruption.] In just 16 weeks, an estimated 18,000 Palestinian children have been left without a single living relative.
]]>To address the point made by
When the SNP last called for a vote on the ceasefire on
When the shadow Foreign Secretary said that the vote today would not bring about a ceasefire, he was right, but to try to downplay the importance of the motion does not serve him well. I suspect that, as these moments do not come around very often, he understands only too well the importance of tonight’s vote. It is moments like these that shape the ethical identity of a country. It is the decisions that we take now that will reverberate down the decades, and they will define who we are and what we stand for. That is why we are calling so clearly and unambiguously for an immediate ceasefire. Anything else pre-supposes that there can be a military solution to this conflict. Any other form of words threatens to give credence to the idea that Israel’s deploying its massive military capacity in Gaza will somehow be enough to destroy Hamas. In reality, as everyone knows and as history tells us, the only possible solution to this crisis is a political solution.
]]>“It’s not this vote that will bring about a ceasefire.”
Of course, he is right. Voting for an immediate ceasefire today will not by itself bring about an end to the slaughter, but the impact, and the impact on the optics, of this Parliament, hitherto one of Israel’s staunchest allies, saying that enough is enough, and calling for an immediate ceasefire, would be enormous. While not in and of itself bringing about a ceasefire, support for this motion would further remove that ever-thinning veil of legitimacy that the UK’s continued support gives to Israel’s merciless war in Gaza. It would also show the beleaguered and battered people of Palestine that we care and we have not forgotten them. Calling for an immediate ceasefire would be a pivotal moment in the campaign to stop UK arms sales to Israel. As a South African Foreign Minister said last week, the decision to stop the fighting in Gaza is in the hands of the countries that supply Israel with its weapons. Who knows, it might also help some of the UK’s political establishment and those seeking to aspire to their position to locate their moral compass.
]]>That this House calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel; notes with shock and distress that the death toll has now risen beyond 28,000, the vast majority of whom were women and children; further notes that there are currently 1.5 million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah, 610,000 of whom are children; also notes that they have nowhere else to go; condemns any military assault on what is now the largest refugee camp in the world; further calls for the immediate release of all hostages taken by Hamas and an end to the collective punishment of the Palestinian people; and recognises that the only way to stop the slaughter of innocent civilians is to press for a ceasefire now.
Our motion calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, from all combatants. I wish to put on record, once again, our unequivocal condemnation of the Hamas attack of
No one would deny that Israel has the right to defend itself—every country has that right. What no country has the right to do, however, is lay siege to a civilian population, carpet-bomb densely inhabited areas, drive people from their homes, erase an entire civilian infrastructure, and impose a collective punishment involving the cutting off of water, electricity, food, and medicine from civilians. And no country, regardless of who it is, can, in the name of self-defence, kill civilians at such a pace, and on such a scale, that in just 16 weeks almost 30,000 are known to have died, with a further 80,000 injured. We cannot allow the core principle of self-defence to be so ruthlessly exploited and manipulated in order to legitimise the slaughter of innocent civilians. If we do that, what hope is there for the future of the international rules-based order, an order created to protect people from atrocities, not to be used as a smokescreen to hide the execution of them?
If we accept what Israel is doing in Gaza as the new norm—as the new accepted standard of self-defence—we undermine that core principle, which is meant to protect and defend us. Therefore we cannot accept that what is happening now is self-defence, because of the precedent that it will set. I have no doubt that that thought contributed to the United States issuing its clearest warning yet to Netanyahu that it would not support his proposed ground offensive in Rafah. This is why the UN Security Council is currently debating a ceasefire as we speak today, and even the US has recognised that a ceasefire must happen for a peaceful political solution. Of course, that does not go nearly far enough, but it does show that things are moving, opinions are changing and the guarantees that Israel has come to rely on are gradually withdrawing.
]]>Of course, the 2005 referendum did not lead to an independent Kurdistan, because of threats from neighbouring countries, but it did enshrine the autonomy of the Kurdistan region in the new Iraqi constitution, which promised the protections of autonomy and citizenship based on a federal, ethnically diverse and inclusive model with strong minority rights and guarantees against discrimination.
It will come as no surprise to anyone present that, like the hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke, the SNP supports Kurds’ right to self-determination and to decide their own constitutional future. We fully understand why, despite having a degree of autonomy, the people of Kurdistan still want their independence. That desire was expressed again in no uncertain terms in 2017, with another referendum, in which 92% backed independence on a turnout of 72%. It would be foolish in the extreme for anyone to assume that that desire has gone away.
To quote the words of the hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke ahead of the 2017 referendum, he sympathised with the Kurdish position and understood
“why the Kurds feel that federalism has failed and their belief that it cannot be revived.”
It is therefore essential that, in building a healthy, co-operative, mutually respectful relationship with the Kurdistan region of Iraq, the United Kingdom never loses sight of Kurds’ fierce desire for their own independent nation state. There is no doubt that today the UK Government have a key role in facilitating the development of a good relationship between the Kurdistan region and the rest of Iraq—one that helps to realise the economic potential of both and strengthens security and democratic Governments not just in Iraq but in the region as a whole.
We have seen in recent weeks that these are extremely worrying and volatile times for the whole region. Tension between the KRG and the federal Government in Baghdad has not gone away, and is currently being exacerbated by a fiercely contested dispute over the status of the province of Kirkuk and control of its oil fields. The hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke was right when he said that against that backdrop, and the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza, there was a missile attack last month by an Iran-affiliated group that claimed to have hit an Israeli spy base near Irbil. It was a blatant and flagrant breach of sovereignty, which was rightly condemned by both the KRG and the federal Government. Of course, Iran has form, having already attacked Kurdistan in 2022 in response to protests following the death of a young Iranian Kurdish women, Mahsa Amini. Those attacks killed 20 people, including civilian women, refugees and children.
The long-running conflict between Turkey and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, which has seen tens of thousands killed in the last four decades, has never been resolved. I thank the hon. Member for Strangford again for raising the question of what exactly the UK can do to help to facilitate a deal between the PKK and Turkey. Anything the UK and its partners can do to bring stability, dial down tension, and crucially avoid any escalation would be extremely welcome right now.
Of course, Kurdistan is not just having to cope with external pressures. Internally, it is having to cope with the consequences of the war on Daesh and a mass influx of people fleeing that barbaric onslaught. In the attack on Sinjar and the appalling genocide of the Yazidis that followed, Daesh fighters killed thousands of men and boys, abducted male children to fight as child soldiers, and kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery Yazidi women and girls, 2,700 of whom are still missing today and whose fate we cannot ever allow to be forgotten.
Those who could fled, many to Kurdistan. They never expected to stay and have always yearned to return to their home in Sinjar to rebuild their lives, but that has not happened because of a lack of security and an all too real fear that although Daesh has been defeated militarily, the ideology that fuelled them is still very much alive. That has resulted in a refugee crisis in Kurdistan, with more than 120,000 Yazidis still living in dire poverty and makeshift camps almost a decade after fleeing their homes in Sinjar when Daesh attacked.
Just this time last year, I visited several of the internally displaced people’s camps with the humanitarian NGO Bellwether International, to see the conditions in which the Yazidi people are forced to live. It was a harrowing experience to see thousands of families living in row after row of plastic-sheet tents, and to see children born into those camps who know nothing else but growing up in those conditions—where their parents, and particularly their mothers, still live through the trauma they went through at the hands of Daesh.
The camps are desperate places in which people who want to return home are losing hope. I cannot escape the conclusion that the international community has completely abandoned these poor people and no longer regards their situation as an emergency, leaving it to the Kurdish Regional Government, NGOs and charities to look after them. In addition to all the other issues that have been raised by right hon. and hon. Members, I ask this of the Government: please do not forget or turn your back on the Yazidis stuck in IDP camps, and please be part of the search for a long-term solution that will allow them to return home, to rebuild their lives in security and safety.
]]>Although I reply on behalf of the SNP, I should point out that since 2016 I have been chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the Yazidis. Like many others, I have had the privilege of visiting the region. Indeed, it was exactly a year ago that I flew into Irbil and visited Duhok, Shekhan, the holy site of Lalish and several of the Yazidi IDP camps—a subject I will return to later. I put on the record my sincere thanks to the hon. Member for Strangford for raising the plight of Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities in Kurdistan. As soon as I saw him in his place this morning, I never doubted for a moment that he would.
The hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke spoke movingly of the hideous genocide of the 1980s in which tens of thousands died at the hands of Saddam Hussein. He was right to highlight the crucial role played by Sir John Major. Since 1992 the Kurdish people have enjoyed a democratically elected Government of their own, giving freedoms and rights to people that would have been unimaginable under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
Notwithstanding the very real concerns raised by the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington about the current situation in respect of journalistic freedom and the freedom of trade unions, rights and freedoms have been strengthened through the emergence of a raft of civic society organisations, non-governmental organisations and women’s groups, alongside an institutionalised tolerance for religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities. Following the fall of Saddam Hussein, the first independence referendum in 2005 saw 99% support for the creation of an independent Kurdish state.
]]>“with allies, will look at the issue of recognising a Palestinian state”,
I feel we have been here before, most notably in 2014. Given Netanyahu’s categorical rejection of a Palestinian state, what are the next steps? When will we hear about them, and how confident can we be that we will not be sitting here in another 10 years, wishing we had acted to prevent a genocide?
]]>The ICJ ruling also demanded that effective humanitarian assistance be provided to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza. Instead, the UK Government immediately chose to cut funding for UNRWA —one of the few organisations that stand between the people of Gaza and mass starvation—on the basis of 12 of its 13,000 employees having been accused of taking part in the atrocities of
Can the Minister explain the thought process that led the Foreign Office to that decision? What cognisance did it take of the ICJ ruling, and why did it choose to ignore it? What assessment has the Department made of the numbers of Palestinian children who will die as a direct result of that decision? Finally, does he not see that, by continuing to arm the IDF, this Government place themselves on the wrong side of history, and that history will judge them accordingly?
]]>It should come as no surprise to anyone that today’s debate has united Members on both sides of the House in support of the people of Hong Kong, their democratic institutions and their fundamental human rights. They have enjoyed these human rights for years: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right to strike, the freedom to travel, the freedom of association and, as we have just heard from
Everyone who has spoken has noted how the 1984 Sino-British declaration promised the people of Hong Kong that they would
“enjoy a high degree of autonomy”
for 50 years after the handover to China. They were also told that their lifestyle, rights and freedoms—everything they enjoyed—would remain intact and unchanged for half a century after 1997. We are little more than halfway through the 50 years that were guaranteed, but those basic freedoms and those human rights that they were assured of have become a distant memory. Lord Patten’s famously optimistic line was:
“Now, Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong.”
Sadly, that could not be further from the truth.
Although we recognise that 1997 was an important step in global decolonisation, we deeply regret that, contrary to what was promised to the people of Hong Kong in a legally binding international agreement, the Chinese Communist party has completely reneged on its end of the deal. The steady erosion of personal and political freedoms has now become a full-on assault, as the Beijing Government, through the passage of the insidious national security law, embarks on a draconian programme of assimilation and integration of Hong Kong into the Chinese mainstream. As the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham said, that completely dismantles, once and for all, the notion of there being one country, two systems.
We have heard that national security laws were passed in June 2020 in response to huge pro-democracy protests. That crackdown has led to a mass exodus of people. Although those laws are specifically designed to criminalise secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign organisations, they have effectively stripped away freedom of expression and peaceful protest, and extinguished Hong Kong’s independent free press, turning Hong Kong, in just four years, from being one of the most open cities in Asia to one of the most repressive.
Those national security laws are designed to create doubt and ambiguity in the minds of the people as to whether what they are doing—indeed, what they have always done—could now be considered a criminal act. The only people who know what the law actually means are the people who make it, and there is a deliberate fug of ambiguity and confusion about what actually constitutes an offence that would endanger national security. That fug of ambiguity has had the desired effect because, as we have heard today, dozens of civil society organisations and trade unions, as well as the independent press, disbanded and shut down, for fear of falling foul of a law that they simply do not understand.
Every speaker today has talked about the most high-profile victim of these national security laws, Jimmy Lai. The 76-year-old UK national is a citizen standing trial on three charges under these laws and faces a further charge of conspiracy to publish seditious literature. Since his arrest in 2020, Mr Lai, a strident and fearless pro-democracy activist, has been held in solitary confinement and has now spent more than 1,200 days in prison. This political show trial of a long-time critic of the Chinese Communist party started early last month, and he faces life imprisonment. We must prepare ourselves, because it is a question of when, not if, he is found guilty. That is because, not surprisingly, there is a 100% conviction rate under the national security laws. I thank
Amnesty International’s deputy regional director, Sarah Brooks, has said:
“Jimmy Lai is the most high-profile public figure prosecuted under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, and the world will be watching.”
She added:
“The prosecution of Jimmy Lai shows how Hong Kong’s repressive National Security Law is being used to stifle press freedom and crush civil society.”
She is right that the world will be watching.
The International Federation of Journalists has said that the use of these laws
“and archaic sedition legislation to silence critical and independent voices in Hong Kong must cease”,
and has called for all such charges to be dropped.
Even the United Nations has expressed deep concern about what it sees as an inextricable link between Jimmy Lai’s outspoken, pro-democracy criticism of the Chinese Government and his arrest and the show trial. It is clear that Beijing and Hong Kong are orchestrating an assault on the free press and freedom of expression. Jimmy Lai’s trial epitomises that rapid decline in the rule of law in Hong Kong.
In 2022, I described in this Chamber the situation in Hong Kong as grim. Sadly, it is even more grim today and there is little prospect of it getting better any time soon. In that debate two years ago, I and every other speaker raised the issue of the Magnitsky sanctions, asking the Government why, despite the flagrant breach of human rights law, no senior Hong Kong official had been sanctioned. That question is relevant today and I ask it again. What is the point of having the ability to sanction those who flout international law if we are not prepared to use it? If the ripping up of an international treaty, a crackdown on the free press, a curtailment of civil liberties, a full-on attack on democracy and the imprisonment and potential jailing for life of a UK national cannot bring the Government to use Magnitsky-style sanctions, the question must be: what would it take?
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