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Human Rights

It is a bit of a busman's holiday for me to speak in this debate, as I am Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. We obviously concentrate on human rights in the United Kingdom, but it can sometimes be frustrating for the Committee to see so many problems around the world that we are not allowed to investigate. I compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) on his speech and on the work of his Committee. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on the Government's report on human rights. It is a pity that we should be debating the 2007 report at the end of 2008, because much of it is out of date. However, the debate has shown how we can bring some of that material up to the present. I refer to the 2009 Durban review conference. The UN world conference against racism was held in Durban in September 2001. It was a groundbreaking achievement. For the first time, the international community came together to create a declaration and a programme of action to tackle racism, discrimination and xenophobia. However, the conference was plagued with problems, and was hijacked by anti-Israel and anti-Zionist groups. They led a well organised and well funded high-level campaign, backed by Islamic and Arab Governments, to exclude anti-Semitism from the anti-racism agenda, to label Israel as an apartheid state responsible for genocide, and to revisit the equation that Zionism equals racism. Despite the efforts of Islamic and Arab states to include that extreme negative test, the final Government level declaration at Durban 1 contained positive text on anti-Semitism and holocaust commemoration. The problem, however, was that the language has somehow become legitimised as extreme rhetoric, and is now often widely accepted in mainstream attacks on Israel. Durban began a trend to exclude terrorism against Israel and anti-Semitism from the entire global human rights agenda. In April 2009, a Durban review conference will be held in Geneva. The final conference will produce a declaration, which is meant to be a review of the extent to which the Durban 1 declaration has been implemented, and it will make recommendations for further action. The April conference will be the final part of a longer review process. Although the proposed text before the conference has not been agreed, it is of great concern. It includes suggestions that Israel is an apartheid state, that Israel's occupation is racist, that Zionism is racism and that Israel is committing genocide. It questions Jerusalem being the capital of the Jewish state, excludes Jews as victims of racism and excludes holocaust denial from victims of the racist agenda. It creates a hierarchy of categories of racism, whereby Islamophobia is considered to be more important than any form of racism. It also wishes to curtail freedom of expression to include criticism and blasphemy of religion. Although the document is not final, and it is subject to high-level government negotiation, at present it is the only text available. The Israeli and Canadian Governments have already formally withdrawn from the process; and the United States withdrew from Durban 1. Some states have noted that they might withdraw if the draft document crosses their red lines—for example, Denmark and France. I am pleased to say that I have received good assurances from my hon. Friend the Minister, to which I shall refer in a moment. The red lines are appropriate and fair. They are that there should be no singling out of any one state; no clause relating to defamation of religion; the retention of the anti-Semitism condemnation; the retention of holocaust commemoration; and, in particular, no hierarchy of racisms. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary met the United Nations commissioner for human rights in November. He informed the commissioner that the United Kingdom was dissatisfied with preparations for the conference, including the drafting of the document and challenges in it to the right of freedom of expression, singling out Israel and the fight against anti-Semitism. I understand that a further round of negotiations will take place next month, after which the Government will assess their position. I should be grateful if my hon. Friend the Minister would give us a clear assurance that if those red lines are not met, if the text stays as it is, the Government will consider it to be unacceptable and will withdraw from the conference. Ultimately, it is a contradiction in terms: a conference against racism cannot proceed with a text that excludes anti-Semitism and that has a hierarchy which considers some forms of racism to be more serious than others. I hope that my hon. Friend will give us those assurances. I am pleased to say that early-day motion 83 has attracted a significant number of signatures in support of that contention. I refer next to Cyprus. We do not often hear about Cyprus in the context of human rights, but we should. I shall not speak today about the Cyprus problem; I have secured an Adjournment debate on the subject on 16 January. I want to speak about some of the specific human rights issues that arise there. In that context, I declare an interest. I have just returned from a visit to Cyprus, and some of my expenses were met by the House of Representatives. The general issues are well know: the deprivation and expropriation of property whereby Greek Cypriots have, since 1974, been expelled from the north; the refusal to allow people to return to their own homes; un-investigated deaths from both 1963 and 1974 and many other similar, serious generic human rights problems. However, I want to focus first on the enclaved people in the Karpas peninsular in the north, which I visited for the second time a few weeks ago. Their lot is not much improved. They are effectively living in a police state, in fear and without the benefit of the rule of law. They are oppressed, and there are now only 200 or 300 of them left out of an original population of tens of thousands at the time of the Turkish invasion in 1974. If somebody left Karpas to seek an education in the south they would not be allowed to return. Families are not allowed to return. They do not have the right to run their own businesses—those that they had in 1974 were expropriated. Houses are in poor condition, and have not been modernised because they are not allowed to repair them. Indeed, some houses were demolished while the residents were away receiving medical treatment. They live in extreme poverty and destitution. Their lot is appalling. Last year I wrote to the secretary-general of the Council of Europe about the matter, and I would be grateful if my hon. Friend the Minister could say what efforts the Government are making to support and raise those concerns in the Council of Europe and to make representations to Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot authorities. I would like to talk about the Maronite enclaved people, who are hardly ever referred to. Northern Cyprus contains four Maronite villages, one of which, Agia Marina, has been entirely expropriated for use as an army camp, and its people are not allowed to return even to visit the church. I went with them to the gate of the army camp. The soldiers were perfectly polite—I have no complaint about the way in which they responded to us—but made it clear that we were going no further than the road barrier. Maronites are allowed to return to the village of Asomatos only for a couple of hours on Sundays to visit the church, but they are not allowed to ring the church bell—in fact the rope has been taken away to ensure that that does not happen. Only a couple of old ladies now live in Asomatos, and they are completely isolated on the fringes of another army camp where properties have been requisitioned by the Turkish army. The Maronites are frightened that their whole culture is dying out. They are worried that their language is dying and that Maronites living in the south are being assimilated into the wider Greek Cypriot community. That is a serious human rights issue about which we hear very little indeed. In fact, I think that this is the first time that their lot has been debated in the Chamber. There are wider issues about freedom of religion in the north. When I visited, a few weeks ago, I saw increased mosque building, mainly on Greek Cypriot land. This year the people of Morphou were not allowed to Agia Mama on 2 September—the saint's day. The day before St. Andrew's day, I visited Apostolos Andreas, the church at the very end of the Karpas peninsular. It is in poor condition. People were there for a religious festival, but when they tried to ring the bell, the police stopped them. That is inappropriate behaviour in a part of the European Union—albeit, there is a derogation in relation to the inability of the Cyprus Government to govern matters in the north. The north Cypriot economy is in a real state. It relies on income from casinos and increasingly from ““night clubs”” that are nothing more than brothels in which far too many trafficked women are forced to work, whose cause we have done nothing to raise. What attitude will the Government take to deal with that problem when making representations to Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot authorities? We have heard a lot in this House about the restrictions in Turkey on freedom of speech and expression and about what happens to journalists, such as Dink, who was murdered, but we hear little about what goes on in northern Cyprus, which is subjected to a very similar regime. Just over a week ago two young Turkish Cypriots, aged 19 and 21, were arrested, taken to court in the north and remanded in custody for seven days, for insulting Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat on a personal Facebook group. They had used pretty childish and abusive language to criticise Talat along the lines of, ““So you're President now, you think you're a big ass””, among other things. Apparently, a journalist from Yeni Duzen, which owes its patronage to the Republican Turkish Party—the CTP—got wind of the Facebook group and reported it to the Turkish Cypriot police, who arrested and detained the two boys and are now trying to track down the other 160 group members. Last Friday, the boys were remanded for another seven days so that the police could complete their so-called ongoing investigation. I understand that there is a strong risk that they will be formally charged probably based on criminal defamation laws. That comes after four youths were beaten, arrested and had their passports confiscated a few months ago in the north, for writing, ““Turkish troops out of Cyprus””, on a wall. So it goes on. A journalist whom I know well, Sener Levent, was jailed in the north for things that he had written, and faces dozens of criminal charges. We see in northern Cyprus the same sort of oppression as we see in Turkey.