My Lords, in welcoming the Minister to her fairly new responsibilities, the lodestar in today’s short debate is Article 18 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, promulgated in the aftermath of the defining horrors of the Holocaust and in a century during which 100 million people were murdered because they chose in some way to be different. Today Article 18 is honoured only in its breach. In the light of new genocides, concentration camps, abductions, rape, forced conversions, forced marriages, imprisonment, persecution, public floggings, enslavement, mass murder, beheadings and the vast displacement of millions of people, we should ask ourselves: of what value are such declarations or conventions on genocide if they can be utterly disregarded with indifference and contempt?
Let us look at the evidence. The annual Pew study of religious freedom found that in 24% of countries, in which 74% of the world’s population lives, there were serious restrictions on religious freedom. One-quarter of the world’s countries have blasphemy laws and more than one in 10 have laws penalising apostasy. This has led, for instance, to a death sentence in the case of Pakistan’s Asia Bibi; to the public beating of Saudi Arabia’s atheist Raif Badawi; to the imprisonment for 10 years in Iran of Saeed Abedini, for “undermining national security” after hosting Christian gatherings in his home; to Chinese Catholics such as Bishop Cosma Shi Enxiang, who died at 94 after spending half his life in prison; and to Chinese Protestants, who since the beginning of 2016, have seen 49 of their churches defaced or destroyed, crosses removed and a pastor’s wife crushed to death in the rubble as she pleaded with the authorities to desist. Earlier this
week, on Tuesday, Mr Speaker hosted the premiere of “The Bleeding Edge”, drawing attention to the harvesting of organs of Falun Gong practitioners in China.
In countries such as Nigeria, Sudan and Kenya, contempt for Article 18 has led to the targeting and murder of Christians, Yazidis and others by ISIS, the Taliban, al-Shabaab and Boko Haram. In North Korea, a country I have visited four times, 300,000 people are incarcerated in gulags. A United Nations report describes it as a country “without parallel” and highlights the execution and imprisonment of Christians.
I have seen contempt for Article 18 in many other situations: among Rohingya Muslims persecuted in Burma; in degrading detention centres in south-east Asia where fleeing Pakistani Christians and Ahmadis are incarcerated; and at its bloodiest worst among Chaldean and Assyrian Christians and Yazidis fleeing the genocide in Syria and Iraq. Yet, for fear of offending countries such as Saudi Arabia, which have exported so much of the poison, we rarely call things what they are.
In Pakistan, for example, the Government describe events as “discrimination” and refuses to recognise them as persecution. Over the summer I was guest of honour at Liverpool’s refurbished Pakistan centre. It was a wonderful evening of celebration. Pakistan’s green and white flag was designed to represent the green of Islam and the white of the minorities. In 1947, Pakistan’s great statesman and founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, crafted a constitution which promised to uphold plurality and diversity and to protect all citizens. Jinnah said:
“You may belong to any religion, caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State. Minorities, to whichever community they may belong, will be safeguarded. Their religion, faith or belief will be secure. There will be no interference of any kind with their freedom of worship. They will have their protection with regard to their religion, faith, their life and their culture. They will be, in all respects, the citizens of Pakistan without any distinction of caste and creed”.
However, whether judged against the backdrop of the assassination five years ago of the country’s Christian Minister for Minority Affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti, who questioned the blasphemy laws, or the orgy of bombings, killings, rapes, imprisonment and abductions, notably in Lahore, Pakistan has allowed the systematic targeting of religious minorities in a culture of impunity. This persecution is catalogued in a report that I launched in Parliament.
One escapee recounted how his friend Basil, a pastor’s son, was targeted by Pakistani Islamists attempting to convert him. After refusing, his home was set alight. Basil, his wife and 18 month-old daughter were burned alive. No one was brought to justice and there is little evidence that Pakistan is striving to uphold Jinnah’s admirable vision. Perhaps the Minister, when she comes to reply, will tell us how the more than £1 billion of British aid, given over the past two years, is doing anything to support Pakistan’s beleaguered minorities, often the poorest of the poor, or to promote religious freedom or peaceful coexistence.
The UK fails to name persecution for what it is and, even worse, to name genocide for what it is. Words matter: they determine priorities and policies. The House of Commons, the United States Congress,
the European Parliament and others have declared events in Syria and Iraq to be genocide.
In a leading article, the Times said that the destruction of Christians from the Middle East,
“now amounts to nothing less than genocide … That crime, most hideously demonstrated by the Nazis, now enjoins others to take active steps to protect the victims”.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the right honourable Boris Johnson said that ISIS is,
“engaged in what can only be called genocide … though for some baffling reason the Foreign Office still hesitates to use the term genocide”.
Perhaps when she comes to reply, the Minister will ease Mr Johnson’s bafflement and tell us why the Government still fail to name this genocide for what it is, or to table resolutions in either the General Assembly or the Security Council seeking a referral to the International Criminal Court, or to help establish a regional tribunal to try those responsible. Great nations should not sign conventions or affirm declarations such as Article 18 and then fail to uphold them.
The Minister might also tell us why DfID fails to recognise Christians and Yazidis as “vulnerable” under the criteria for aid and whether it has assessed the reports that Christians and other minorities are too frightened to enter the refugee camps and have even been targeted again when they reach Europe.
ISIS works in a consistent manner, killing men, women and children, but also destroying their holy places, doing its utmost to eradicate any collective memory of a people’s very existence. While the ISIS genocide in Syria and Iraq may simply be seen as inhumane butchery, it is fundamentally an attack on freedom of conscience and belief.
Our failure to prevent, protect and punish contributes directly to the refugee crisis. There are 55 million people now living as refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced persons, with a further 60 million people forcibly displaced. Conversely, in those countries that promote freedom of religion or belief, there is a direct correlation with prosperity and the contentment and happiness of the populace.
How right is the BBC’s courageous chief correspondent, Lyse Doucet, when she says:
“If you don’t understand religion—including the abuse of religion—it’s becoming ever harder to understand our world”.
But western Governments are often illiterate when it comes to religious faith. We just call it “terror” and have developed a worrying, timid moral equivalence, refusing to call evil by its name for fear of giving offence.
Although I welcome strongly the Article 18 conference, which the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will host in October and which I hope the Minister will be able to tell us more about, does the FCO still have only one desk officer dedicated to Article 18 issues? Learning to live together in respect and tolerance, whether we have a religious faith or not, is truly the great challenge of our times. Scholars, the media and policymakers need to promote far greater religious literacy and shape different priorities.
The life-and-death urgency that this task represents was starkly underlined by the recent execution of the 84 year-old French priest Father Jacques Hamel, and
by the murder of the Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah, who often reached out to his Christian neighbours and customers. Tanveer Ahmed allegedly drove up from Bradford to kill Mr Shah because he said that he was disrespectful of Islam. Mr Shah was an Ahmadi. In Pakistan, millions of Ahmadis are denied citizenship and 10,000 have fled this year. Now it seems that they are to be targeted in Britain too.
If Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists and others are no longer to see one another as an existential threat, we must provide an alternative narrative, based on Article 18, capable of forestalling the unceasing incitements to hatred which especially pour from the internet and which capture unformed minds.
Britain, for all its faults, is a society in which adulterers are not flogged, gays are not executed, women are not stoned for not being veiled, churches are not burned, so-called apostates had not, until recently, been killed, and non-believers are not forced to convert or treated as “dhimmis” or second-class citizens. In thanking all noble Lords for participating in today’s short debate, I conclude by saying that we should be proud of the freedoms we enjoy and must work hard to achieve the same freedoms for all. In that task, Article 18 must remain our lodestar.
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