I will speak primarily to new clause 1, in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), my name and those of other right hon. and hon. Members.
I have a deal of sympathy with some of the points raised by other Members, not least those eloquently put by my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) about trafficking and supply chain risks, as well as those to do with organ harvesting, which all feed back to the subject of China. I appreciate the good work of the Minister, who has listened to some of the representations made, particularly by those of us who have continued grave concerns about the influence of China and its insidious involvement in so many aspects of our society.
We appreciate and are grateful for what has happened so far, but it does not go far enough. That is why I want to speak to some of the themes raised by my right hon.
Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green and reinforce how this can only be a staging point and not the end result of what we need to achieve. We very much hope that these provisions will be greatly strengthened in another place.
The new clause that we propose is not extreme or prescriptive. It asks for a serious and realistic timeline, not a completely open-ended one. It passed with a comfortable majority in the House of Lords. It would require the Government to publish a timetable within six months of the Bill receiving Royal Assent for the removal from the UK procurement supply chain of Chinese technology camera companies that are subject to the national intelligence law of People’s Republic of China. It would catch Hikvision and Dahua Technology cameras that are currently in use across the UK public procurement supply, including in NHS trusts, schools, police forces, jobcentres, prisons, military bases and many local council buildings.
Human Rights Watch has found that Hikvision is one of the principle Chinese companies involved in the construction of the Chinese surveillance state and the camps that house over a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, as we have heard. A recent report by Big Brother Watch found that about 2,000 public bodies in the UK—some 61%—currently use Hikvision and Dahua surveillance cameras. Other public bodies that have confirmed, in response to freedom of information requests, that they use those cameras include more than 73% of local authorities, more than 63% of schools, more than 66% of colleges, 54% of higher education bodies, 35% of UK police forces, and more than 60% of NHS trusts. There have also been subsequent reports that Hikvision cameras are being used on UK military bases.
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Hikvision and Dahua are prevalent in businesses and popular consumer chains across the UK, ranging from Starbucks to Tesco as well as newsagents. They are literally all around us, yet no official survey identifies the extent of the issue. Hikvision has successfully cornered the UK domestic surveillance market by utilising Chinese state subsidies to undercut its rivals in terms of price. That is why I support new clause 1 and why I am drawing the House’s attention to this urgent matter—the disturbing link between Hikvision, in particular, and atrocities against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang.
Underpinning China’s system of oppression is a high-tech network of surveillance, through which China has unleashed wholesale monitoring and tracking of Uyghur individuals, including biometric data collection of facial imagery and iris scans and genomics surveillance through mandatory DNA sampling. I do not think we have devoted enough time in the House to debating the whole issue of genomics, along with the worrying trend that is demonstrated by the huge database that the Chinese authorities are assembling globally.
Hikvision and Dahua are the world’s largest manufacturers and suppliers of video surveillance equipment. Both companies are owned by the Chinese Government and, since 2017, both have signed contracts worth at least $1.2 billion for 11 separate large-scale surveillance projects across the Uyghur region. They are contracted to develop, install and operate CCTV
technology across the region’s public checkpoints, mosques, factories and concentration camps—as we now know them to be.
We should remember that the House voted unanimously to recognise the Chinese genocide against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Although it may not have been a binding vote and the Government have yet to come round to the thinking of the vast majority of Members, it was nevertheless a vote in the House, reflecting the clear evidence provided by Sir Geoffrey Nice in the Uyghur trials about 18 months ago. There is compelling, detailed, startling but convincing evidence of what was going on then, and of what is still going on under the noses of the world. Having been trialled in places such as Tibet for decades before, these practices are being increasingly extended towards Hong Kong, where, as we see daily on our television screens, the rule of law is being increasingly snuffed out,.