Transnational Repression in the UK (JCHR Report)

Lord Cryer Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cryer (Lab)]

My Lords, it is my duty and pleasure to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Isaac, to his place and congratulate him on an outstanding maiden speech. The rest of us will have to look to our laurels in the next few years, I suspect. The noble Lord, Lord Isaac, CBE, is, as noble Lords have heard, provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and chair of the governors of the University of the Arts London and of the Henry Moore Foundation. Throughout his career, he has consistently been involved in the arts, education and human rights; we heard some of that a few minutes ago. He is also a former chair, as we have heard, of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, of Stonewall and of Modern Art Oxford.

On a personal note, I thank the noble Lord for the delivery of the report on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. He was not chair when the report was delivered but he oversaw and initiated it. That, for me, was a major turning point in Labour Party history and probably more widely in British political history. He was also a trustee of Cumberland Lodge, and a director of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, of the Human Dignity Trust, of the Big Lottery Fund and of 14-18 NOW. He was also for many years, as noble Lords have heard, a partner at Pinsent Masons and made a CBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours List. I do not know where he found the time for all that, but there we are.

I turn to the debate. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who has an exemplary track record on issues of human rights around the world, and to the JCHR and the report that it has produced, which clearly demonstrates that a lot of regimes are using physical and digital means to target individuals across borders. The key passage from the report, from my point of view, states that testimonies point to a continuing gap between policy commitments and lived experience, including delayed police responses, subpar case management and persistent intimidation faced by diaspora communities. That is very clear about where we are. The report points to a number of countries but, in the short time I have, I will focus on two, China and Iran, which both use force against expats—we have heard a lot about that from the noble Lord, Lord Alton—and at times against British citizens.

The recent events in Iran should not need any repetition but, unfortunately, they do. We have seen, night after night, the persecution during the recent demonstrations by Iranian citizens. The recent crackdown probably involved the murder of 36,000 Iranian citizens. The figure is likely much higher than that, but that figure can be readily attributable to the Iranian regime. Agents of the Iranian state, as we have heard, have attacked peaceful demonstrators in central London on a number of occasions. I welcome the fact that the Government—I have engaged in Questions with my noble friend the Minister about this—have recently introduced new criminal charges that have been put on to the statute book, whereby if you have undeclared links to the Tehran regime, you can be prosecuted. That was not the case before and is to be welcomed.

However, as has been mentioned many times, the IRGC—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—remains unproscribed. Individuals may be prosecuted and they have been proscribed, but we have failed to proscribe it as a collective unit. We are talking about an enormous organisation that employs some 140,000 to 150,000 people globally and uses proxies in many countries, including in this country and across Europe. In the other place and here, I have seen Ministers—from both Governments—come to the Dispatch Box who are clearly sympathetic to proscribing the IRGC, then it does not happen. That points to a culture at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office that clearly militates against proscribing the IRGC.

That brings me on to China, which I also want to focus on. We all read regularly and see the reports about the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province. That is well known. I remind your Lordships and those who may not have been aware of it at the time that, extraordinarily—it sounds like a work of fiction—three or four years ago, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office officials invited the governor of Xinjiang province, the butcher of Xinjiang, to a meeting in London. The reason why that the meeting did not happen is that my former parliamentary neighbour found out about it and tabled a UQ.

I see that I have run out of time, so I will quickly mention a couple of points. We need to stop the construction of the embassy; that permission has to be revoked. We need to see the proscription of the IRGC. Finally and more widely, we need to see greater capacity in Britain’s military abilities, because the best protection against war is preparing for it.