Genocide Determination Bill [HL]

Baroness Goudie Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goudie (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, on securing the Bill’s Second Reading and on his persistence, which spans a decade from its first introduction in 2016. Today, as an adviser to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, and someone who has spent many years, like others in this House, working on conflict-related sexual violence, I welcome today’s opportunity to speak in support of the Genocide Determination Bill.

I would like to ground my support in an example. I have addressed the House before on Sudan’s wider humanitarian crisis. I return to it through the lens of accountability. In February this year, the United Nations independent fact-finding mission for Sudan concluded that the Rapid Support Forces’ siege and takeover of El Fasher bore the hallmarks of genocide against the Zaghawa and Fur communities. The mission documented mass executions, enforced disappearances and widespread sexual violence, deployed alongside starvation as a co-ordinated campaign to destroy these communities. Yet, as with Darfur two years earlier, there remains no mechanism in United Kingdom law through which survivors can ask the courts to make the kind of determination that successive Governments have said should properly be made by judges rather than Ministers.

This is the problem the Bill seeks to fix. It is victim centred. It allows survivors and organisations representing them to bring evidence before the courts. That principle should not be underestimated. The United Kingdom has formally recognised only five instances of genocide since the convention was adopted in 1948, despite being one of the 154 state parties, and having acceded to it in 1970. The gap between our obligations and our practice is precisely what this Bill seeks to close.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights identified shortcomings in our domestic legal framework relating to accountability for international crimes. This Bill would not resolve every aspect, but it would give our courts a defined role in identifying when the threshold of serious risk has been reached. The procedure in the Bill should be genuinely accessible to survivors of sexual violence: confidential, trauma-informed and mindful that the evidential realities of atrocity, particularly for women, rarely fit conventional courts.

This is a practical Bill. It does not ask the Government to abandon their long-standing position that determination is a judicial matter; it simply asks that our own courts be equipped to do what that position already assumes they should.