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Human Rights

I am not aware of any age cut-off for criminal proceedings by the International Criminal Court. As I said last year, there is a serious requirement to consider the ambit of international criminal law. The situation in Zimbabwe has worsened hugely since our previous debate, just over a year ago. What steps will the Government take, with other Governments, to ensure that Mr. Mugabe is indicted and brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague? I come now to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. In the debate last year, I referred to the situation in Gaza and the occupied territories, and I have no compunction about doing so again. It is deeply regrettable that, as in Zimbabwe, the situation is no better, and is markedly worse than a year ago. Gaza is effectively a giant prison in which 1.25 million Palestinians are imprisoned by the Israelis. Indeed, it is worse than any modern, properly run prison, because it is a prison where power supplies may be, and have been, cut off. It is a prison where food supplies may be, and have been, cut off. It is a prison where job opportunities are vanishing almost to the point at which they no longer exist. It is a prison where basic services, such as health and education, are breaking down. It is no good the Israeli Government saying that that is justified on security grounds. That justification does not wash on moral, legal or effective policy grounds. An indisputable historical fact is that no terrorist action or movement has ever been stopped or overcome by a general system of reprisals against the surrounding civilian community. That has never succeeded, and will not succeed in this case. To make my position clear, I condemn, as strongly as anyone, terrorist action out of Gaza towards the Israeli settlements in southern Israel. It is indefensible, I condemn it utterly, and I fully support the Israeli Government in dealing with it, but terrorism must be countered by targeting the terrorists. Terrorism cannot be countered by a system of reprisals against the general civilian population. The situation in the west bank is little better, and was extraordinarily well set out in the 2008 report ““The State of Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories””, which, to its great credit, was produced by the Israeli organisation, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. An opening paragraph encapsulates absolutely what is going on in the west bank, and states:"““The massive presence of the settlements in the heart of the Occupied Territories and the policies adopted toward them has created a state of institutionalized separation and discrimination as well as a nullification of the principle of equality. In the same territorial area and under the same administration live two populations who are subject to two separate and contrasting legal systems and infrastructure. One population has full civil rights while the other is deprived of those rights. The absolute separation between the populations is purely on the basis of national origin. The settlers' lives, although they live in an area under military rule, are in almost every respect the same as those of Israeli citizens living in Israel. This is in stark contrast with the local population in the same area, the Palestinians, who continue to live under the regime of a military occupation. Thus, for example, a Jew who has committed a crime is entitled to all the rights of an accused under Israeli law, and will be tried before a civil court, whereas a Palestinian who has committed a crime—even during the same event—is subject to much harsher military law and will be tried under the military court system; Israel has built a modern arterial road system in the West Bank intended in fact only for use by Israeli traffic, whereas the Palestinians are forced to travel for the most part on twisting and dangerous roads; the discriminatory use Israel makes of the planning system in the Occupied Territories restricts building and any possibility of expanding Palestinian towns and villages, in contrast with the generous planning flexibility enjoyed by the settlers; the amount of water allocated to the settlements allows them to grow grass and build swimming pools, whereas there are Palestinians who are forced to buy drinking water from tankers.””" That sets out accurately and acutely the division of human rights into two in the west bank. How long will the British Government, as well as most of Europe and certainly the US Government, remain so extraordinarily passive and silent about the absolutely unacceptable position of human rights for Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories? The British Government and many others must give an altogether different level of priority to the matter and show a willingness to speak out frankly to the Israeli Government on what they need to do to recover respect in the international community with regard to the treatment of the Palestinian community, while at the same time—I make this absolutely clear—supporting the Israeli Government in trying to deal directly with terrorists or those who are committing atrocities against the state of Israel. With the Prime Minister's statement today, it is clear that we are coming to the end of our military involvement in Iraq. Quite apart from the call from those on the Opposition Front Bench for a public inquiry on how we came to invade Iraq in the first place, there will be a need for evaluation of the consequences of our invasion and subsequent involvement in that country. I urge the Government to produce, in the course of the next year as our time in Iraq comes to an end, an evaluation of what has been the overall equation with regard to human rights, and to do that evaluation objectively, honestly and impartially. I was at a NATO Parliamentary Assembly function in Washington at the beginning of this week, and on Monday the hotel where we were staying delivered to me that day's edition of USA Today. A report on the front page of President Bush's final visit to Iraq stated:"““After the news conference with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Bush visited Camp Victory, a military base, to greet hundreds of cheering troops. He said…'Thanks to you, the Iraq we're standing in today is dramatically freer, dramatically safer and dramatically better than the Iraq' in 2000””." I have to say that we had a very lopsided presentation from a human rights standpoint from the Prime Minister in his statement today. Let us consider the three yardsticks that President Bush erected. Is Iraq dramatically freer? Yes, there are aspects on which Iraq undoubtedly is substantially freer than it was under Saddam Hussein, which is very welcome. It may be somewhat fragile, but there is a genuine degree of democracy, and there is hugely enhanced freedom of expression and freedom of the media, which is all-important in a free society. However, with the huge wave of criminality, kidnapping and sectarian violence, I wonder how many ordinary Iraqis feel today that they are dramatically freer in terms of being happy to leave their homes, to walk around in the streets, to be on their own—women in particular—and to go about their business. I wonder how many of the millions of ordinary Iraqis feel today that their ordinary way of life has been made dramatically freer against the background of some of the factors to which I have referred. Is Iraq dramatically safer? One group of people cannot answer that question. They are the hundreds of thousands—we do not bother to count them—of Iraqi civilians who are dead as a result of what has been unleashed internally in Iraq following our invasion, dead as a result of criminality and dead as a result of sectarian violence. Will the Minister give us her best estimate of how many hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died as a result of violence in Iraq since we invaded? Another group of people, who most certainly can answer the question, would answer with an emphatic no. Those are the people who have voted with their feet—the people who have felt it necessary to leave their homes, the people who have become refugees in other parts of Iraq and in neighbouring countries. The figures for those—we owe a debt in this regard to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—are appalling. Some 2.7 million Iraqis have been forced to become refugees in their own country. A further 2.5 million have become refugees in neighbouring countries. More than 5 million Iraqis have been forced to become refugees. Iraq has not proved dramatically safer for them. There are those who have had to flee because of religious persecution. Whatever the evils of Saddam Hussein's regime—there were many of them—because it was a secular state, it was not into religious persecution. The figures that have been reported in the press regarding the decimation of the centuries-old Christian community in Iraq are that five years ago, there were 800,000 Christians in Iraq; today, that has slumped to 250,000. More than 500,000 Iraqi Christians have been forced to flee the country. An issue that we dealt with specifically in our report is the safety of women in our own area of responsibility in the Basra area. At paragraph 128 we said:"““We believe that the deteriorating human rights situation faced by women in many parts of Iraq is unacceptable, and we recommend that the Government should use all its leverage to press the Iraqi Government to ensure women are afforded security””." The Government, in their reply, offer some figures and claim that in the Basra area the extent of violence against women is reducing. I point out to the Minister—perhaps she will comment on this—that the figures in the Government response are wholly contrary to the report and figures that were produced in The Independent on 30 November. It stated:"““Authorities in the southern Iraqi city of Basra have admitted they are powerless to prevent 'honour killings' in the city following a 70 per cent. increase in religious murders during the past year.""There has been no improvement in conviction rates for these killings. So far this year, 81 women in the city have been murdered for allegedly bringing shame on their families. Only five people have been convicted…One lawyer in the city described how police were actively protecting perpetrators and said that a woman in Basra could now be murdered by hired hitmen for as little as $100””—" $100 for a woman's life. I hope that the Minister will respond to that. The final claim was that Iraq is dramatically better. President Bush did not quantify what he meant by ““better”” in that context, but I assume that he was referring to living standards. Living standards for some have improved, but for others they remain grim. There are huge levels of unemployment. There are still poor levels of power supplies. There are worries about public health and there are certainly worries about stability. I put it to the Minister that although there have certainly been significant human rights pluses, the House of Commons, the public at large and certainly the Foreign Affairs Committee will expect the Government to produce, as we exit from Iraq, a full, objective and independent evaluation of the human rights results—both the benefits and the adverse consequences—of our invasion of Iraq. I turn next to a matter referred to by the hon. Member for Ilford, South—the key cross-cutting issues of women's rights and children's rights to which we refer in paragraph 12 of our conclusions. In it, we also refer to the important roles of free trade unions and a free media. I hope that the Government will take the recommendation seriously and that they will respond fully on those crucial areas of the universal application of human rights. It is important to appreciate just how valuable free trade unions have been—I stress free, and not state-sponsored unions—both historically and today in safeguarding and upholding individual human rights. It is a reflection of the effectiveness of free trade unions that they have always been hated by fascist Governments and communist Governments. It is worth recalling that when Hitler came to power in 1933, the first people to be sent to the concentration camps were the trade union activists, not the Jews. As for the communist states, free trade unions were ruthlessly suppressed by Stalin, and they are being ruthlessly suppressed by the Chinese Government today. I hope that the Minister will say clearly that the Government are out to support free trade unions—most particularly, I suggest, in the People's Republic of China.