My Lords, I add my voice to those of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, my noble and learned friend Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Chakrabarti, in saying to the Minister, for whom I have considerable respect—I know of his own track record in the area of international law and the upholding of human rights—that beyond the legal arguments that have already been put to him is the reputational damage to this country, not least because of international issues, some of which he will be aware of.
Anything that we do to dilute our commitment to the 1951 convention on the treatment of refugees—any unravelling or unscrambling of our commitments—is to be deplored. I will give two examples to the Minister. I co-chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea and am vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uyghurs. In the case of North Korea, we, the United Kingdom, will regularly raise with the People’s Republic of China the refoulement policy of
sending North Koreans from the PRC, to which they have escaped, back to North Korea, knowing that terrible things, including executions, will happen to them when they are sent back—a clear dereliction of the commitment to which the PRC signed up in the 1951 convention on the treatment of refugees.
In the case of Uighurs, Turkey is presently considering sending back Uighurs because of an agreement that it has reached with the People’s Republic of China. Everyone in your Lordships’ House—notably the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, who is in his place; he raised this issue with me as recently as last week, in another debate—is well aware that there are 1 million Uighurs in detention centres and camps in Xinjiang, and we know of terrible atrocities that have occurred. Our own Foreign Secretary has said that a genocide is under way. In that context, for any country, and in the case of Turkey a NATO country, to be sending people back, again in violation of its duties in the 1951 convention, seems to be deplorable. However, the United Kingdom can hardly start lecturing others not to do these things if we ourselves are going to unscramble and diminish the importance of the 1951 convention.
I suppose that, as a post-war baby, I have maybe too much admiration for what was not entirely a golden age, but think about all the things that were put in place at that time: everything from the Marshall aid programme to the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, with its 30 articles that set out our rights on an international basis, and the 1948 convention on the crime of genocide. Given all those things that have been put in place, we should think extraordinarily carefully before we do anything to diminish or dilute them. That is why I hope the Minister will give proper consideration to the interventions that he has heard so far—I am sure he will—and, between now and Report, see what more we can do to ensure that we do nothing to diminish the importance of the 1951 convention.