Genocide Determination Bill [HL]

Baroness Helic Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Helic (Con)]

My Lords, last week marked the 31st anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, where 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were systematically murdered in what the United Nations had declared a safe haven. Their wives, daughters and sisters were subjected to rape and expulsion as part of a calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing. In March 1995, Radovan Karadžić, president of the self-declared Republika Srpska, issued directive 7, ordering the creation of, in his words,

“an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival … for the inhabitants of Srebrenica”.

Four months later, those words were translated to ethnically motivated mass slaughter. In 2007, the International Court of Justice confirmed that Srebrenica was genocide. Srebrenica did not occur because the world lacked information. Karadzic’s interventions were set out in plain terms. The warning signs were unmistakable. UN peacekeepers were in Srebrenica. Diplomatic cables were incoming. The failure was not of knowledge but of political will.

The lessons have still not been learned. Only two days ago, a serving Serbian Government Minister declared that if she had been Slobodan Milošević, she would have ethnically cleansed Kosovo in 1998. Three decades after Srebrenica, language that seeks to justify ethnic cleansing is still being voiced from public office. That should alarm us all. We have since witnessed Daesh’s attempt to destroy the Yazidis and the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, and today there are grave reports of mass killings in Gaza and Sudan.

Whatever conclusion courts ultimately reach, these crises expose the same fundamental weakness: that legal processes move more slowly than the atrocities they are intended to address. This is why the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, matters. It does not ask Ministers or politicians to determine whether genocide has occurred but gives practical effect to the Government’s long-standing position that genocide is a matter for competent courts by providing timely judicial mechanisms through which evidence can be assessed while there is still time to prevent further atrocities.

International courts can take years, sometimes decades, to reach their conclusions. By then, the victims are dead, communities are destroyed and the opportunity for prevention has long passed. This Bill may not prevent genocide, nor can it overcome the geopolitical divisions that so often paralyse the international community, but it would strengthen the United Kingdom’s authority and its ability to fulfil its obligation under Article I of the genocide convention, not merely to punish genocide after the event but to try to prevent it before it reaches its murderous conclusion.

I have three questions for the Minister. First, will the Government make unequivocally clear that the United Kingdom stands firmly behind the International Criminal Court, its independence and its officials in the face of the threats now being directed against it? Secondly, what urgent steps are being taken to prevent the atrocities feared in El Obeid becoming another El Fasher? Thirdly, what measures are being taken to ensure that the United Kingdom does not become complicit, directly or indirectly, in the atrocities that may ultimately be found to constitute genocide in Gaza and Sudan?

History’s greatest failures have seldom resulted from ignorance. More often, they have resulted from a failure to act on what was already known. Srebrenica stands as a permanent reminder of the cost of that failure. The Bill seeks, in a modest but important way, to ensure that we do not repeat it.