I thank Paul O’Kane for bringing this important debate to the chamber. We often say those words at the start of members’ business debates on all manner of subjects, but, in this case, it is especially true—critically so, given that the importance of this subject should not be underestimated.

About 20 years ago, my wife and I visited Oswiecim in the south of Poland—the site that we know in English as Auschwitz. We took my teenage daughter there to witness the inhumanity that occurred on that site. No one could fail to be moved by the memorials and the industrial scale of the slaughter that took place there and elsewhere, not just in concentration camps but in towns and villages across Europe—events that resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews and millions from other groups in horrific circumstances.

The horrific events of the Holocaust are the most significant example of genocide in modern times, but the act of genocide is, unfortunately, nothing new in human history, and it continues to the present day. It has been estimated that 43 genocides could have occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in perhaps 50 million deaths. On this Holocaust memorial day, it is important that we recognise genocides that have taken place in Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia and, here in Europe, Bosnia in the 1990s. In 1995, I visited Bosnia as part of an aid convoy with Edinburgh Direct Aid—an organisation that has delivered humanitarian aid to many war zones and nations that are affected by crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, its work is still badly needed.

The theme of this year’s Holocaust memorial day is “Fragility of Freedom”. Commemoration means nothing if we do not truly learn lessons and take steps to stand against genocide, wherever it occurs. That is the primary lesson. It can happen anywhere, to any group. There is always that risk. In the words of Dutch Jew and Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer, “Never again, for anyone.”

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defined genocide for the first time as any of five acts

“committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

The five acts are killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions that are intended to destroy the group, preventing births and forcibly transferring children out of the group. A key point is that victims are targeted not randomly but because of their real or perceived membership of a group. The International Court of Justice has a key role to play in assessing cases that might constitute the crime of genocide, and it continues that important work to this day.

In combating genocide, we must always be aware of how it starts. Dehumanising language, comparing whole groups of people to animals and calling for extermination, mass slaughter or collective punishment are signs that we need to be alert to, and we need to expose and combat such behaviour whenever it arises. In Rwanda, the Tutsi people were described as cockroaches. More recently, ethnic groups have been described as human animals. Incitement to genocide is recognised as a separate crime under international law—a crime that does not require genocide to have taken place to be prosecutable. Those who call for the wholesale destruction of a people, their forcible transfer or collective punishment are guilty of that crime.

The 10 stages of genocide have been identified as classification, symbolisation, discrimination, dehumanisation, organisation, polarisation, preparation, persecution, extermination and denial. Awareness of how that process works allows us to recognise it and call it out. We must be alert to and challenge all forms of hatred and prejudice, including antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism.

Nothing is more important than the need to expose and root out the signs that lead to genocide. Preventing the recurrence of the Holocaust begins with an understanding that it can happen to any group, anywhere. At this time of year, we also take time to celebrate our national poet. Although the two are not often linked, it is perhaps worth reflecting on Burns’s words:

That Man to Man the warld o’er

Shall brithers be for a’ that.

A recognition that people of any ethnic group are not animals is a good place to start.