On July 17, Lord Alton of Liverpool, a life-long human rights champion who is a member of the Leadership Council at Fortify Rights, the organisation I work for, will present the Genocide Determination Bill for Second Reading in the House of Lords.
By Benedict Rogers in The Tablet
Almost five years ago, I sat in the crowded auditorium in Church House in Westminster, listening as British barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice KC presented the judgment of an independent tribunal established to investigate whether the atrocity crimes suffered by China’s predominantly Muslim Uyghurs amounted to genocide. Sir Geoffrey – who prosecuted Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic for genocide – went through the evidence the tribunal had heard during its many hours of public hearings and through thousands of pages of written evidence submitted and methodically pronounced the tribunal’s judgment on each alleged atrocity. On many counts, the charge of genocide was not proven, but on one – the deliberate and systematic imposition of measures to prevent birth, including acts such as forced sterilisation and forced abortions – the tribunal concluded that the Chinese state, led by Xi Jinping, is committing genocide against the Uyghurs.
But it took an independent tribunal – established and funded by civil society and with no judicial power, only moral authority derived from the credibility of its expert panel – to reach this conclusion, because the British government’s policy is that genocide determination is a matter for the courts, not politicians, and no British court is currently empowered to make such a determination. This week, there is an opportunity to change that.
On July 17, Lord Alton of Liverpool, a life-long human rights champion who is a member of the Leadership Council at Fortify Rights, the organisation I work for, will present the Genocide Determination Bill for Second Reading in the House of Lords. The Bill is designed to end the absurd merry-go-round where the government refuses to recognise a genocide, saying it is for the courts, but without British courts having genocide determination within their judicial scope. It will give the High Court in England and Wales, and its equivalent Court of Session in Scotland, the power to receive submissions from survivors and victims of atrocities, or organisations on their behalf, and make a determination as to whether these indicate that a genocide is underway or there is a serious risk of a genocide being committed.
If the court determines that there is a genocide or the risk of one, the government – under this Bill – would be required by law to act to fulfil its obligations under the Genocide Convention to prevent it or punish the perpetrators, by imposing sanctions or referring the case to the International Criminal Court, International Court of Justice or other international bodies.
If this Bill passes, it will be an historic moment and provide a long overdue mechanism for addressing what has become known as the crime of crimes. Ever since Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944 and campaigned for it to be codified in international law in the Genocide Convention in 1948, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the world has understood what it means to seek the destruction of people on grounds of ethnicity, race, religion, nation – in whole or in part – but it has been limited in its willingness to prevent or punish.
Every time a genocide has occurred or been alleged – from Rwanda to Bosnia, from Darfur to Cambodia, from the Uyghurs, and the Rohingyas, to the Palestinians in Gaza – the international community has wrung its hands and said “never again.” Yet every time, it becomes “never again” except in the present case, because the political will to stop genocide while it is happening always seems lacking.
Over the past thirty years I have witnessed and documented first-hand appalling human rights violations – from East Timor to Myanmar, from the persecution Uyghurs, Tibetans and Falun Gong practitioners in China to crimes against humanity in North Korea. I have sought accountability for all these atrocities, but instead impunity has prevailed.
The first person I met when I arrived in East Timor in early 2000, after the carnage unleashed by the Indonesian military and their militia following the independence referendum, was a teenage boy living homeless in the streets. “My mother, with baby, dead,” were his first words to me. In broken English and with tears in his eyes, he indicated with a thrusting movement how they had been stabbed to death. He then described how the rest of his family had also been killed. During Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor from 1975-1999, up to a third of the population died – either killed in massacres or by famine and disease.
The UN International Commission of Inquiry on East Timor ultimately found that Indonesia had committed crimes against humanity, but no senior Indonesian official was ever held accountable. In fact, the current President of Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto, played a personal role in the atrocities committed during Indonesia’s occupation as the commander of Indonesia’s special forces in the 1970s and 1980s, and was never prosecuted.
In Myanmar, I have documented atrocities throughout the country over the past twenty-five years. Many of these are recognised as crimes against humanity and war crimes. But it is the predominantly Muslim Rohingya who are suffering a genocide – one which the organisation I work for, Fortify Rights, was one of the first human rights groups to expose.
When I visited the refugee camps in Bangladesh in 2018, only a few months after the Myanmar military committed massacres of Rohingya in Rakhine State, the stories I heard were harrowing. I met a 16-year-old girl who lay paralysed on the floor of her bamboo hut. She told me that when the Myanmar army attacked her village in August 2017, they killed 300 villagers, including her father, two sisters and one brother. She was shot multiple times and only survived by hiding among the corpses.
I also met an imam whose eyes filled with tears as he told me how Myanmar army soldiers took the Qu’ran, “played football with it” and then tore it to pieces, before burning down his mosque.
In 2010 I began advocating for the United Nations to establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate crimes against humanity in North Korea. Many people initially told me it was a waste of time, but momentum grew and in 2011 I co-founded the International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity, an alliance of more than 40 human rights groups from around the world to campaign for a UN inquiry. Less than two years later, the Commission of Inquiry was formed by the U.N., and in 2014 it presented its report, concluding that “the gravity, scale and nature” of the crimes against humanity by North Korea’s regime “reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.” It recommended that Kim Jong-Un be called to account at the International Criminal Court. Yet more than a decade later, that report sits on a shelf gathering dust, and Kim’s regime continues its atrocities unchallenged.
For all these reasons, the Genocide Determination Bill is much needed and long overdue. Not all atrocities reach the level of genocide. As a crime, genocide has a high burden of proof, and rightly so. It is not a term that should be loosely thrown around. Crucially, intent to destroy a population – in whole or in part – must be proven, or at least inferred based on substantiated evidence. Civil society has a role to play in documenting evidence and advocating policy, and politicians have a responsibility to act upon evidence, but to determine whether a crime has been committed, it is right that an independent judicial process be established. That is what the Genocide Determination Bill does, and that is why it should command cross-party support from both Houses of Parliament and become law.
This article was originally published in The Tablet.