I draw the House’s attention to my relevant entries in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I join other Members in congratulating the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) on securing the debate and the Backbench Business Committee on granting it. It is absolutely right that the House takes the opportunity to commemorate the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and it is a pleasure to speak after three compelling and powerful speeches by hon. Members on both sides of the House.
The Kinyarwandan word kwibuka means remembrance, and we are part of Kwibuka20, the 20th anniversary of the genocide. A flame of remembrance has been carried around Rwanda, and a similar flame of remembrance was carried around this country. I was delighted to join the lord mayor of Liverpool and others in welcoming the flame to Liverpool town hall in March 2014. The hon. Member for Braintree spoke about the event at which the Rwandan Foreign Minister spoke—the global conversation, which was hosted here in Parliament in March. I was delighted to be part of that event, and then to have the privilege to go back to Rwanda last month to attend the commemoration at which, as has been said, we were represented by the Foreign Secretary and the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds).
Since last December I have chaired the all-party parliamentary group on the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. That all-party group was set up in 2005, in the wake of the world summit to take forward the important principle of the responsibility to protect. I am delighted that in framing of the motion before us, the hon. Member for Braintree has not only remembered Rwanda but has made that express connection to the responsibility to protect. I will return to that at the end of my remarks.
I thank the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, which funded my attendance of the Kigali international forum on behalf of the all-party parliamentary group. At that forum I made a proposal that we should have a global parliamentary network of parliamentarians in all continents who are determined to work together on a cross-party basis to prevent future genocides and other mass atrocities. At the moment, the only other
Parliament that has an all-party group similar to ours is Canada. It was set up at the behest of Roméo Dallaire, who is now a Senator in the Canadian Parliament but was the UN commander on the ground in Kigali in 1994. I was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss the establishment of such a network with parliamentarians from Rwanda itself, from other east African Parliaments who attended the Kigali forum, from the German Parliament on a cross-party basis, and from Australia, and I will be working with colleagues, I am sure, on both sides of the House and in the other place on forging that global parliamentary network, which is an initiative of the Aegis Trust.
The hon. Gentleman spoke about the important work of the Aegis Trust. I had the privilege to work with the trust for five years during my enforced exile from this place between 2005 and 2010. It was with the trust that I first went to Rwanda in 2005. The Aegis Trust is a remarkable organisation, set up originally by a family in the parliamentary constituency of Newark, by coincidence, whose first act was to establish the holocaust memorial in this country known as Beth Shalom. The Smith family are a Christian family who visited Yad Vashem in Israel, saw the holocaust memorial there and made the decision to establish a similar memorial in this country. They used their own home to provide that museum, which educates thousands of young people every year on the horrors of the Nazi holocaust and other genocides and mass atrocities.
After the family had run the holocaust memorial for some years, a number of people asked them, “What about what is happening now? What about other genocides that have happened since the holocaust?” They therefore decided to set up the Aegis Trust to remember what had happened in Rwanda, Cambodia and elsewhere, and crucially to work for the prevention of further genocides and mass atrocities. Both Stephen Smith and James Smith have rightly been honoured by Her Majesty the Queen in honours lists, most recently with James, the chief executive of the trust, being awarded the CBE.