Trade Bill

Lord Polak Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 7th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow so many powerful speeches supporting this ground-breaking amendment, particularly that of my noble friend Lady Cox just now. We are 72 years on from the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, yet we still fail to prevent, suppress and punish this horrific crime. By ignoring it, we are complicit. Of the 17 genocide alerts around the globe, 14 have reached mass extermination. I want briefly to focus chillingly on an area that affects my own profession, with some forced to participate under extreme threats.

In China, surgeons are accused of forced sterilisations and, most horrifically, forced organ-harvesting on a mass scale. It was Nazi doctors like Mengele who perpetrated atrocities, experimenting on innocent people; the list of their actions is sickening. They hid their horrors behind the excuse of medical and scientific advancement. Now, we see the same things happening.

What can be done? Considering China and many other countries’ powerful positions, as has been said in this debate, engaging the UN will fail. We therefore must strengthen our domestic mechanisms to fill the void left by international bodies. We cannot say that now is not the time: now is never a comfortable time and we must have the courage to do what is right. Amendment 9 is a step toward strengthening our domestic response to genocide. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, hopes, it could start a global movement towards zero tolerance of these depravities. It is the time for action. This amendment must be supported.

[Lord Polak (Con)]

I pay tribute to the movers of this amendment, in particular my noble friend Lord Alton—for he is my friend—for his tenacity and passion. On 29 October 2018, following the horrific attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, when 11 people were gunned down, I spoke in this Chamber and posed the question:

“Have we learned nothing from history?”


I went on to say that

“it is nice to stand shoulder to shoulder and offer sympathy, but it is action that is now required.”—[Official Report, 29/10/18; col. 1122.]

Amendment 9 gives us a chance to take action. Wringing our hands and mouthing nice words will deter no one.

Just three weeks ago, I paid tribute to Lord Sacks in this Chamber and was struck by how many noble Lords, from all parties and none and from all traditions and none, spoke of him with such affection and admiration. In rereading some of his writings, I came across a lecture from 17 February 2004, entitled “Never Again”—But Will We Ever Learn the Lessons of History? The lecture by Rabbi Sacks was at a national service taking place to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, which he described as

“an almost unimaginable orgy of violence”

with people

“hacked to death by machetes … in a country where perpetrators and victims had previously lived together as neighbours”.

Rabbi Sacks continued by explaining that, the next day, 18 February 2004, was Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust memorial day in the Jewish calendar. He explained:

“Apart from attempted genocide, the Holocaust and Rwanda had two things in common. First, they were preceded by deliberate dehumanisation: the Jews were deemed ‘vermin’ or ‘lice’; the Tutsis were Inyenzi, ‘cockroaches’.”


As he put it:

“In this way mass murder could be justified as a kind of sterilisation, a necessary, if painful, operation to restore a nation to its health.”


The second similarity, he argued, was that

“both tragedies were known in advance. The international representatives who gathered at Evian … in 1938 knew that a terrible fate was about to overtake the Jews of Europe.”

Yet they each

“declared that they had no room for refugees… in Rwanda, in 1990 the main Hutu newspaper had issued its own equivalent”

of what he described as “the Nuremberg laws”. By 1992, over half a million machetes had been distributed. He went on:

“In 1993, an international commission gave warning”


that a potential genocide was imminent and the head of the UN peacekeeping force, in 1994,

“passed on a warning … that a mass extermination was being planned.”

As Rabbi Sacks sombrely acknowledged:

“Both times humanity hid its face.”


Amendment 9 is a straightforward, proportionate call to action. As my noble friend Lord Cormack said in his moving speech, it says that we simply cannot turn a blind eye, even in the interest of trade deals, when a state is guilty of genocide.

I know that it is late, but permit me to state very clearly my support for the campaign led by Andrew Mitchell MP. On 21 May 2020, he wrote an article, published in the Times, under the headline “Britain has a duty to bring genocide accused to justice”. He said:

“No fewer than five alleged Rwandan genocide perpetrators live in the UK”,


four of whom receive benefits. While the US, Canada, France, Belgium and Sweden, among others, have extradited those accused to face the Rwandan justice system, which abolished the death penalty more than 10 years ago, shockingly, we have not. Andrew Mitchell ended his words with the following:

“The souls of the slaughtered Tutsis cry out for justice but Britain has turned a deaf ear. We should all be ashamed.”


I call on the Government to deal swiftly with this matter, certainly before the next CHOGM, to be held in Kigali—the Rwandan capital—next summer.

Finally, on 23 September 2020, I said in this House that the treatment by the Chinese of Uighur Muslims was horrific, yet within days, as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, said, China was elected to sit on the United Nations Human Rights Council. We all witnessed the footage of Uighur people being herded on to trains and transported to camps. It is footage that is all too familiar. Many of us who have heard first-hand accounts of the depredations of the Nazi camps know how major industrial companies ruthlessly used the slave labour in those camps to produce their goods and to make their fortunes. Will it be a case of business as usual as companies profit from the blood, sweat and tears of today’s slave labour or are we prepared to do something about it?

Towards the end of his presentation, Rabbi Sacks said that people often asked: where was God in the Holocaust? He maintained that that was the wrong question; the real question was: where was man? He suggested that it sometimes appears that we have learned nothing, which is why memorials are necessary. Tonight, in this House we are confronted once again with the same question: where were we when we had the chance to act against those who are responsible for today’s most grievous crimes against humanity? For those who have said and will say that the Trade Bill is not the place for such an amendment, I say that I will not join with the hand-wringing and the mouthing of nice words brigade. I will join with those who vote for action by supporting this amendment and I urge all noble Lords to do likewise.