That this House takes note of the role of government policy in combating atrocity crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords participating in today’s debate, along with the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, Protection Approaches, and the Coalition for Genocide Response—of which I am a patron—Dr Ewelina Ochab, and the House of Lords Library for its invaluable background papers.

My thanks also to the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, who in 2021, from the Opposition Front Bench, was such an outstanding supporter of the genocide amendments to the Trade Bill—about which I shall say a little more at the conclusion and a lot more on 17 July, when my new Genocide Determination Bill, introduced earlier today, receives its Second Reading.

It is particularly apposite that we are debating this topic today, as we mark the 37th anniversary of the horrific Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing—and indeed across China—on 4 June 1989, graphically symbolised by the heroism of “Tank Man”, who stood against the dictatorship’s might. It was moving from me to attend earlier today the unveiling of a new statue to “Tank Man” and to hear Kate Adie describe the horrors that unfolded in the square that day, where she was as a young journalist. We recall the many brave advocates for democracy and human rights incarcerated today by the Chinese Communist Party, including Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai. All over the world, it is patently obvious that we need more of the steely resolve of “Tank Man” in demanding justice for victims and an end to impunity.

Let me give the House some examples of our wholly inadequate, inconsistent and sometimes craven approach. In 2015, I raised the plight of the Yazidis and other minorities, which the House of Commons declared to be a genocide. In response, the Foreign Office said that Parliament had no right to declare a genocide. In the case of the Yazidis, seven years elapsed until a German court used universal jurisdiction to convict an IS insurgent of Yazidi genocide. Perversely, two years later, in 2023, having blocked attempts to enable our own High Court to make a genocide declaration, the FCDO said that the German court’s findings would enable it to formally recognise a genocide.

In a report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I have the honour to chair, looking at the Yazidi genocide committed by British members of ISIS, we highlighted the more than 400 returnees to the UK, not one of whom has been prosecuted for the crime of genocide or crimes against humanity. Is that still the case? When will we act on the JCHR’s recommendation to extend universal jurisdiction? Let us contrast that decision to finally recognise the Yazidi genocide with the FCDO’s almost simultaneous removal of its recognition of what the ICC had declared to be a genocide in Darfur—this, despite speeches from Ministers, still extant online, describing atrocities in Darfur as genocide.

While the FCDO airbrushed Darfur out of its list of genocides, several organisations were ringing the alarm of an impending new genocide. In April 2023, I chaired an inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Sudan and published a report entitled Genocide: All Over Again in Darfur? It warned of systematic atrocities against non-Arab ethnic groups and urged immediate international intervention to prevent another genocide. Removing the previous determination inevitably affected our response to the events that were unfolding. By 2026, a UN mechanism confirmed that at El Fasher all the hallmarks of genocide were indeed present. This was predictable—it was preventable. In what is the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, tens of thousands have died, including at Darfur’s El-Daein Teaching Hospital, where 70 people were killed, including 13 children and three medical workers.

Why is it important to call out atrocities such as this for what they are? Under the 1948 convention on the crime of genocide, such determinations require us to take decisive steps; our obligations are to prevent, protect and punish, and they are crucial in understanding early warning signs of future atrocities. What of our duty to hold perpetrators to account? Why is Omar al-Bashir, charged by the International Criminal Court with the 2003-08 genocide in Darfur—a systematic campaign of mass killings, rape and forced displacement, which I saw myself at first hand—still at large? Will his early arrest be part of the Foreign Secretary’s welcome decision to create the international coalition to prevent further atrocities in Sudan?

Staying with Africa for a moment, which I know is close to the Minister’s heart and where he did great work as the Africa Minister, can he update us on action to bring the perpetrators of wicked crimes in Tigray—especially the targeting of women—to justice? Are we acting on the admirable proposal of the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, for a permanent mechanism focused on conflict-related sexual violence? In Nigeria, what assessment has been made of the recent statement of Caleb Mutfwang, governor of Plateau state, that over 60 entire villages have been eradicated by jihadist militias? He said:

“I cannot find any explanation other than genocide sponsored by terrorists”.

Is the FCDO at least conducting a joint analysis of conflict and stability assessment in Nigeria?

In the DRC, the Ebola crisis is happening against the perfect storm of endless atrocities by jihadists and terror groups which include massacres, beheadings and abductions across the eastern provinces of North Kivu and Ituri. On 12 May 2025, when I raised the execution of Christians by jihadists, the Minister wrote telling me that:

“We are alarmed and saddened by the attacks by IS-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces … all those who have committed human rights violations and abuses must be held accountable”.

A year has passed. Has anyone been held to account? With gross impunity in so many situations, is it any wonder that genocide happens over and over again?

What of that other theatre of war, in Ukraine? As we recall appalling atrocities committed in Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum, Olenivka and elsewhere, what progress are we making in holding Vladimir Putin’s regime to account for his atrocity crimes, including abduction of children and recent reports of forced recruitment and trafficking of foreigners to fight in the Russian armed forces in Ukraine? This has been documented by Fortify Rights, on whose leadership council I serve, and Truth Hounds, which later this month will be publishing a ground-breaking report on the use of sexual violence by Russian military against Ukrainian men. What are we doing to support the efforts to ensure justice and accountability for such crimes?

Where war crimes occur, whether they are committed by our foes or our friends, we must uphold the conventions, especially the Geneva convention. As is clear in Gaza, even wars must be governed by laws. I refer to my Question answered on 29 April concerning reports of the deaths of more than 38,000 women and children in Gaza. The conventions set the standards for international humanitarian law, and we ignore or abandon them at our peril.

Elsewhere, in Burma such war crimes occur daily. During several visits, both legally and illegally, I have walked through the smouldering villages of Karen state and interviewed survivors of the military’s attacks. I visited a burned-out village near the capital, Naypyidaw, in the aftermath of attacks on the Muslim community. Will the Minister examine the reports by Fortify Rights about airstrikes and related atrocity crimes across Myanmar, and its call to bring the military, the Arakan Army and Ata Ullah—the leader of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army—to justice for their atrocities?

Can the Minister update us on progress in the case brought by the Gambia at the International Court of Justice—supported, I was glad to see, by the United Kingdom—on charges of genocide against the Rohingya? What progress is being made in achieving the request by the ICC prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Myanmar’s dictator, Min Aung Hlaing?

With Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP, I co-chair the APPG on North Korea, where human rights violations have been described in a UN commission of inquiry report, chaired by the Australian Justice Michael Kirby, as

“a state without parallel”.

I have been in North Korea on four occasions, met many escapees and chaired numerous hearings here in Parliament—including one just two weeks ago with Thae Yong-ho, former North Korean deputy ambassador to the UK and one of the highest-level defectors. Thae told us that, when the commission of inquiry reported, senior figures in the North Korean regime were initially very nervous reading the commission’s call for the leadership to be tried by the ICC for crimes against humanity. However, he said that, when it became clear that the international community were not going to act upon the call by the ICC, the regime in Pyongyang regained its confidence.

What does this say about the international community’s effectiveness in addressing atrocity crimes? Do we have any intention of ever following through on the recommendations of the commission of inquiry, and what stops us as a country from leading those efforts? North Korea, like Iran, routinely imprisons, tortures and executes people, even for listening to banned music or watching banned movies, and 300,000 people are incarcerated in its gulags and prison camps.

North Korea, Iran, Russia and China are part of what the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, calls “a deadly quartet”. In noting that all four have sanctioned me, the House will not be surprised that I am deeply disappointed by the response we have made to the CCP’s atrocities in China. What practical actions have we taken in response to the two independent tribunals chaired by the eminent lawyer, Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, who prosecuted Milosevic, and which found evidence of genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, a view again endorsed as such by the House of Commons, and forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China?

On China, what practical response are the Government making to two other inquiries by the Joint Committee on Human Rights? Last year, we heard evidence of CCP transnational repression in the UK, including the imposition of a bounty on the head of a young woman, Chloe Cheung. The committee unanimously identified the CCP regime as the worst TNR offender and said it should be placed in the top tier of the foreign influence registration scheme—when will that happen?

In a second unanimous report, the JCHR also found that state-imposed, coercive, forced labour in Xinjiang is widespread and deeply entrenched in global supply chains of everything from cotton to solar panels. Is it reasonable to simply do business as usual with the CCP regime, which Sir Geoffrey says is

“interacting with a criminal state”.

Are we simply turning a blind eye or, rather, ravenously eyeing up the next trade deal?

The duty to prevent genocide in Article 1 of the convention is triggered the moment a state learns or should have learned that there is a serious risk of genocide. In 2021, the all-party genocide determination amendments to the then Trade Bill were passed here in this House with substantial majorities, including with eloquent support from the noble Lord, Lord Collins, who moved amendments linking trade to human rights violations and called for Magnitsky sanctions on perpetrators; some of those things are still waiting to happen. Crafted with the wise assistance of the former Supreme Court judge, my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead, and supported by two former Lord Chancellors, the genocide amendment was opposed by the Foreign Office and Trade Ministers and ultimately was wrecked by an amendment—now Section 3 of the Trade Act 2021—that is not worth the paper on which it was printed and which does nothing for victims survivors of genocide.

Successive Governments were lamely repeating the Foreign Office mantra that “only a court” can decide whether grievous criminality constitutes genocide while disingenuously blocking every attempt to empower our own UK courts to do so. The failure to provide judicial architecture has a further undesirable effect. It allows the word genocide to be misappropriated and turned into a slogan. Preventing the High Court from making a determination plays into that sloganeering.

The noble Lord may have been encouraged to repeat the FCDO’s contention that failure to formally recognise a genocide does not hamper our ability to act. However, as I explained in the case of Darfur, this is far from empirical reality. There is also recommendation 7 of the Truro review on genocide and atrocity prevention and the future of the mass atrocity prevention hub, on which I hope we will hear more when the Minister comes to reply.

Atrocity crimes come at great cost. They are linked to identity-based persecution, collective punishment, sexual violence, a culture of impunity, endless repetition and a deficit of accountability, playing into security and humanitarian challenges, including the mass displacement of over 120 million people. Instead of obfuscation about the future of the hub, we need clarity and transparency, and we must have JACS assessments that are not kept secret but published, so that we know why and what action is being taken.

What is not acceptable is a continuation of the illusion that we have a clear and effective strategy for combating atrocity crimes. In so many respects, today’s debate puts atrocity crimes back on to the House of Lords’ agenda, and I am incredibly grateful to all noble Lords who are ensuring that that will happen. I thank all noble Lords who are going to speak. I beg to move.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing this timely debate. “Never again” was the promise made after the Holocaust. Since then, the world has witnessed Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kashmir, Myanmar and more recent mass atrocities in South Sudan and Sudan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. The promise has been broken too often.

Prevention is not a technical footnote to foreign policy. It is the central test of whether the post-1945 international system works. Once mass killing begins, stopping it costs more lives, money and credibility than preventing it. We must get better at early warning and early action. Atrocities do not erupt without signs. Hate speech that dehumanises a group, systematic discrimination, the build-up of militias, attacks on journalists and civil society, the manipulation of elections and identity politics are patterns that UN offices and NGOs have documented for decades.

The UK helped create the UN Office on Genocide Prevention, but early warning is useless without early action. The UN Security Council must shift from crisis response to crisis prevention. That means using the UN General Assembly’s uniting for peace procedure more often when a veto paralyses the UN Security Council. The General Assembly cannot authorise force but it can mandate fact-finding, sanctions and diplomatic initiatives. We must fund the UN’s prevention architecture properly.

What should the British Government do? The UK has unique tools: it is a P5 seat holder with strong intelligence capacity, a global diplomatic network and the FCDO’s atrocity prevention department. But we need to use these tools more consistently by making atrocity prevention a core objective of all UK country strategies, not just in obvious conflict zones. Trade, aid and security partnerships should all be screened for risk. The UK-India FTA had no human rights clause. That sends the wrong signal. Every agreement should have clear benchmarks and consequences.

The UK must lead on accountability. It should support the ICC, politically and financially, and use sanctions against individuals inciting genocide or crimes against humanity faster. We must protect those who sound the alarm. Journalists, human rights defenders and local civil society groups are the first to document atrocity risks, yet they are often the first targets. Our aid and diplomatic protection must prioritise them.

The UK must address the drivers at home. Genocide does not start with killing; it starts with rhetoric that divides “us” from “them”. The UK must enforce laws against incitement to hatred and disinformation that targets ethnic or religious groups, including online. Prevention begins in our own public discourse.

We must be honest about inconsistency. The credibility of “never again” depends on applying it everywhere. When international law is enforced selectively, with some victims getting UN Security Council resolutions and others silence, the whole framework weakens. Civilians in Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine, Myanmar and Kashmir deserve the same standards of protection.

Prevention is political, not just humanitarian. It means being willing to have difficult conversations with allies and partners. It means accepting that short-term stability brought about by ignoring repression usually collapses into long-term conflict. It means the UK using its P5 voice to push for mediation before the killing starts, not after.

I believe that genocide is not a natural disaster. It is a political crime with political causes. It can be prevented if we choose to see the warning signs and act early. The British Government should make atrocity prevention a standing priority across the FCDO, the MoD and trade policy. The UN should resource prevention, use the General Assembly when the Security Council is blocked and protect those documenting risk on the ground. “Never again” cannot be a slogan we dust off after mass graves are found. It must be the calculation we make when the first warning sign appears.

With that in mind, what is the Government’s assessment of the latest report of the renowned international human rights organisation, Genocide Watch, which indicates that India has reached stage 7—preparation—of genocide? What steps are the British Government taking to stop that genocide taking place? Finally, will the Government publish the annual atrocity risk assessment and table a UN General Assembly resolution strengthening early warning and prevention mechanisms when the Security Council is unable to act?

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, my great friend, for securing this debate and congratulate him on introducing his Genocide Determination Bill this morning. I will of course be supporting him.

Only a few years ago, I, too, promoted a genocide prevention and response Bill. It completed all its stages in this House and it was meant to proceed to the other place, but we then had an election. I remind the House that, at the time, when in opposition, my great friend the Minister supported my Bill. He said:

“The solution in the Bill is absolutely vital. It is to put on a statutory footing this special hub within the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which will monitor and evaluate processes and keep in touch with developments taking place and research being done”.—[Official Report, 22/3/24; col. 456.]

As I said, my Bill did not go through. That is a warning to all who come up well in the Private Members’ Bills ballot.

I hope that the Government have not lost that support and that it has not dissolved, because a lot has changed in our world over the past two years, unfortunately for the worse. We witness not only the highest number of conflicts and atrocity crimes since World War II but a global unravelling of the international rules-based order—a dismantling that will cost us dearly in the long run.

I start with the United States. I am going to mention the inspiration from Elie Wiesel that shaped some of the approaches that were taken by the US before the current Administration. The late Elie Wiesel, who I had the good fortune of getting to know and to meet several times, was a survivor of the Holocaust and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and he understood better than most the consequences of indifference. His warning was simple but profound:

“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim”.

That principle inspired the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act in the United States. The Act recognised that genocide and mass atrocities do not happen overnight. They are preceded by warning signs that slowly but surely progress into full-blown atrocities.

For many years, the United States played a leading role in building international mechanisms for atrocity prevention. The Elie Wiesel Act was the cornerstone of it. The US invested in expertise, early-warning systems and dedicated structures within government capable of identifying risks before they became catastrophes. I had the good fortune of working with many of the lawyers who were involved in that. These structures inside the State Department were not perfect but were far more advanced than anywhere else in the world. Today, however, many of these structures have, I am afraid, been dismantled.

As conflicts are multiplying and international norms are under strain, institutional capacity for atrocity prevention is being reduced. In the long term, the price we will pay for this is much higher than anything that can be saved in the short term.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is undergoing restructuring again in the name of cutting costs. There are concerns that the atrocity prevention hub—which already exists but is small—and the expertise that it contains may disappear or be absorbed into broader structures. That would be a serious mistake that we would feel for decades to come. For now, we are being told that those reports are incorrect. I hope that is true, but we are not provided with any information in relation to these changes and how they will affect the UK’s work on atrocity prevention and responses. What risk assessment was done before any of the proposed changes? How are the changes going to affect our ability to prevent and respond to atrocity crimes? How are they going to affect victims? Atrocity prevention requires dedicated expertise and it requires people engaged with identifying risks, analysing warning signs and ensuring that His Majesty’s Government act before the early warning signs turn into atrocities.

Without a clear and comprehensive mechanism for atrocity prevention and responses, we will be more prone to the mistake of politicising genocide. Our responses will depend not on the suffering of victims but on the identity of perpetrators, our strategic alliances—where we soft-pedal on whom we may be witnessing committing terrible crimes—or geopolitical interests. The result is a system marked by double standards. When genocide becomes a political label deployed selectively, its power is diminished. Victims notice the inconsistency and, even worse, perpetrators notice it too and feel empowered. This challenge is particularly visible in the example, already given by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, of China. The evidence relating to the persecution and genocide of the Uyghurs has been extensively documented by human rights organisations, yet too often our willingness to confront these abuses is constrained by economic dependence and trade relationships. I do not resile from my view that trade is important and prosperity matters, but economic interests cannot be an excuse for silence in the face of atrocity crimes.

Another warning sign that is too often ignored is the growing attack on journalists. Across numerous conflicts and atrocity situations, journalists are increasingly targeted, intimidated or killed. We have seen restrictions on reporting and attacks on independent media in places such as Gaza. Journalists from outside were not allowed in and still are not. In India, we get no coverage now of what is happening in Kashmir or Assam. Then there are Ethiopia and Afghanistan—the list goes on. This matters because atrocities thrive in darkness. Over 200 journalists in Gaza have been killed. Protecting journalists is therefore an essential component of atrocity prevention and accountability.

Throughout these crises, one reality remains painfully constant: children continue to be among the primary victims. We have spoken—this is close to my heart—about what happens to women, with the weaponising of sexual violence in conflict, but children too continue to bear the consequences of our collective failures. We see it in Gaza and in Russia in the war on Ukraine, with the abduction of children for forced adoptions. We are seeing serious war crimes across all conflicts, with children being a significant percentage of victims of conflict-related sexual violence and many other atrocities. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned Sudan, and sexual violence towards children has been one of the signatures of that terrible conflict.

I end by emphasising that we know more than ever before about how atrocities develop. We know the warning signs and we know that institutions can help to prevent them. We know the importance of independent journalism, strong diplomacy, international co-operation and political courage. The United Kingdom has the expertise, diplomatic reach and moral authority to lead. Are we prepared to show that leadership?

My Lords, I express my sincere thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing today’s debate and for his tireless and principled leadership on atrocity prevention. His work, including the Genocide Determination Bill and the genocide amendment to the Trade Bill, both of which I have previously supported, has been indispensable in ensuring that this House continues to confront these issues with the seriousness that they deserve.

I declare my relevant interests as set out in the register and support provided by the Coalition for Global Prosperity, in the form of a parliamentary researcher for one day a week. Along with the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and other noble Lords speaking in this debate, I am a member of the advisory board for the Standing Group on Atrocity Crimes, which is chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. The standing group is conducting an independent review into the UK’s approach to atrocity prevention and response, and I hope the Minister will commit to considering the findings of the group carefully.

The—as ever—excellent House of Lords Library briefing on protecting populations from atrocity crimes provides a sobering reminder of the scale of the challenge. It also sets out the evolution of UK policy across successive Governments, and it is right that we acknowledge this record. Between 2010 and 2024, the previous Conservative Government introduced several significant initiatives. These included the creation of the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, which incorporated atrocity prevention objectives; leadership on the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative and the declaration of humanity; the adoption of recommendation 7 of the Bishop of Truro review and the establishment of the mass atrocity prevention hub within the FCDO, designed to improve early warning and cross government co-ordination; and continued support for international accountability mechanisms, including the work establishing UNITAD to promote accountability for crimes committed by Daesh and ISIL, and support for the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine. These were meaningful steps that strengthened the UK’s institutional capacity to identify and respond to atrocity risks. Since 2024, the Labour Government have expressed a commitment to reinvigorating atrocity prevention policy, including a renewed emphasis on multilateral engagement. These steps are welcome, but they must be matched with clarity, resourcing and urgency.

Despite all these efforts, we continue to see what can only be described as a circular failure of responsibility. National Governments point to international institutions, insisting that bodies such as the UN or the ICC must act. Meanwhile, those institutions rely on national Governments to raise alarms, provide evidence and push forward prosecutions. The result is inertia, and in that inertia atrocities take root. If we are serious about prevention, we must break that cycle.

Another structural weakness is our tendency to view atrocity prevention solely through the prism of armed conflict. Yet some of the gravest crimes of our time have occurred outside traditional conflict scenarios: the persecution of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the systematic violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the atrocities against Muslims and Christians in India—these are all reminders that atrocity crimes can be perpetrated by states against their own populations, often behind a facade of stability. Our frameworks really must evolve to reflect this reality.

Nowhere is the urgency of reform clearer than in Sudan. The conflict that erupted in April 2023 has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian and human rights catastrophes. We have seen widespread and systematic attacks on civilians, including ethnically targeted killings; mass displacement on a scale now exceeding that of Syria or Ukraine; sexual violence used as a weapon of war, including against children; and the near total collapse of legal protections, with no functioning justice system capable of investigating or prosecuting atrocity crimes. There is a growing risk of further genocidal violence, particularly in Darfur, where communities already scarred by past atrocities are once again being targeted. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has mentioned, this is after a UN mechanism already identified hallmarks of genocide in the brutal takeover of El Fasher.

International mechanisms have failed to respond with the urgency required, and the international system remains paralysed. Sudan is not simply a humanitarian crisis; it is an atrocity crime crisis and an impunity crisis. It is precisely the kind of crisis our policies are meant to anticipate and prevent. We often hear and say, “never again”, but this is becoming an eerie refrain, and the evidence suggests otherwise. The International Development Committee has shown that, between 2000 and 2020, at least 37 countries experienced mass atrocities or were at serious risk of them.

Today is the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression. Nowhere is the need for a renewed commitment clearer than in the protection of children affected by armed conflict. The UK has long been a global leader on the children and armed conflict mandate, yet we still lack a dedicated strategy. Such a strategy is needed, especially in the context of significant aid reductions, which risk weakening the very systems designed to protect the most vulnerable. I am grateful to the Minister, Chris Elmore, for his recent reply to the letter from Save the Children that I cosigned, and his indication that the Government are considering a new dedicated toolkit for officials is welcome. But, with the ongoing restructuring of the FCDO, we need clarity on whether the CAAC team will be protected from the ODA cuts, and with it the department’s expertise on CAAC, PSVI and atrocity prevention more broadly. My current understanding is that the restructure has been pushed back and will likely conclude by late summer. I would be grateful if the Minister could comment on that in his response.

Ending impunity remains the single most effective deterrent to atrocity crimes. This requires action on two fronts. We must lead by example. That means passing the Genocide Determination Bill—I look forward to supporting the noble Lord, Lord Alton, in that in the coming weeks and months. It means safeguarding funding for children and armed conflict teams and specialist expertise. It means closing loopholes in our universal jurisdiction framework, as proposed by the Joint Committee on Human Rights and cross-party amendments tabled in the previous Session. It also means continuing to support mechanisms such as the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine.

The Prime Minister has stated that the UK will not be a safe haven for criminals, but, as we know, non-British perpetrators who have committed genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity can visit our shores without fear of prosecution. Can the Minister say whether the UK Government are considering amending the International Criminal Court Act 2001 to stop these cycles of impunity?

Secondly, we must push for stronger international co-ordination mechanisms. I ask the Minister what the Government are doing to ensure that, once the treaty on crimes against humanity is adopted, we can implement the duties enshrined in the treaty. How are the Government supporting the process at the UN to make sure that it is not watered down and will provide an effective mechanism?

With the UK taking on the G20 presidency next year, and the G7 presidency the year after, we have a unique opportunity to elevate atrocity prevention on to the global agenda. Of course, we cannot ignore the cuts to the UK’s official development assistance—the largest proportional cuts in the G7—which will bring ODA to its lowest share of gross national income since 1999. That will obviously have a significant impact on the UK’s ability to do the important work needed on combating atrocity crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

I believe the time has come for a national strategy on atrocity prevention: one that includes statutory powers for referral of suspected genocides and a clear focus on protecting children and young girls in conflict. It should also include a mechanism on conflict-related sexual violence, as previously proposed by my noble friend Lady Helic. If we are to honour our commitments—our moral, legal and historical commitments—we must move from rhetoric to architecture and from aspiration to action. The tools exist. The evidence is overwhelming and we have a responsibility to take action.

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing this timely and important debate and I thank the House of Lords Library for its extremely helpful briefing. It is also a privilege to follow the noble Baroness and to acknowledge all the great work she does in this area. I refer the House to my registered interests as a trustee of Burma Campaign UK and an officer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Burma.

Instances of mass atrocity violence—crimes against humanity, genocide and ethnic cleansing—are not only persisting but in many cases spiralling. The United Kingdom has long accepted a responsibility to help protect populations from atrocity crimes through early warning, prevention, accountability and co-ordinated international action. Yet the persistence of such crimes raises profound questions about whether those mechanisms are being used effectively and, crucially, early enough. Nowhere are those questions more urgent than in Burma.

Burma’s history demonstrates how atrocity crimes follow a recognisable trajectory. Discrimination becomes institutionalised, legal protections are stripped away, persecution intensifies and violence escalates into mass atrocity. Following the 1962 coup, Burma entered decades of authoritarian rule, in which political dissent was violently suppressed and minority groups marginalised. By the 1970s, this had already translated into mass displacement, including the expulsion of around 200,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh. The 1982 citizenship law then rendered the Rohingya effectively stateless, removing any legal protection and exposing them to systemic abuse.

The Tatmadaw has used extreme violence against civilian populations. During the 1988 uprising, thousands were killed in the suppression of pro-democracy protests, entrenching a pattern of impunity that has defined Myanmar ever since. That pattern culminated in the atrocities against the Rohingya, with mass killings, widespread sexual violence and the destruction of communities, forcing 1 million into exile into Bangladesh. These acts are widely recognised as genocide, alongside crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

The lesson is clear: these outcomes are not inevitable. They occur when warning signs are not acted upon, where diplomatic caution replaces decisive action and where accountability is deferred rather than enforced. This is not simply a matter of history; it is a matter of present policy. Since the 2021 coup, the same patterns have continued, yet the military adapted—not to reform, but to survive. It changes names, reshapes its institutions and offers limited concessions, but the underlying reality does not change: military control, impunity and the preservation of power. That is not reform. It is just rebranding.

We see this in the so-called elections of last year, which have entrenched military control rather than loosened it. We see it in attempts to regain international legitimacy, whether through engagement with ASEAN or high-level diplomatic outreach, such as the leader of the Tatmadaw’s visit to India this week as the rebranded “President”. We see it too in gestures such as the transfer of Aung San Suu Kyi from prison to house arrest, designed to encourage re-engagement. We have seen this before. After the 2010 elections, a similar pattern of engagement and eased pressure contributed to an environment in which grave atrocities, including genocide, were allowed to occur. We must not repeat that mistake.

If we are serious about prevention, we must also be serious about pressure. That means working with our allies to target not only individuals but the military as an institution and its sources of power. It means expanding co-ordinated action with the United States, the European Union and others to restrict the military’s core revenue streams, including oil and gas, which finance its operations. It means strengthening action on aviation fuel and supply chains, which sustain the air strikes devastating civilian populations. It means tightening restrictions on financial services and military-linked entities. Crucially, it means ensuring that sanctions follow the reality of military control, not the changing names of its institutions. It also means recognising the UK’s particular responsibility as the UN Security Council penholder on Myanmar. In that role, we are not simply a participant in international efforts; we help shape them. That comes with a duty to lead, by co-ordinating action, maintaining pressure and ensuring that the Council does not drift into inertia at precisely the moment when sustained action is needed.

At the same time, it is essential that we recognise what is happening beyond military-controlled areas. Across Burma, local communities are building democratic systems from the ground up, developing governance structures, consulting citizens and creating new institutions despite ongoing air strikes. This reflects a central principle of atrocity prevention: that protecting populations means supporting resilient, inclusive and democratic alternatives before the violence escalates further. The people of Burma have not given up on democracy, but they cannot succeed alone.

Following the questions asked by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I also have three questions for the Minister. First, on prevention, how are the Government strengthening their early warning and response mechanisms to ensure that indicators of mass atrocity crimes, such as those in Burma, trigger timely and concrete action? Secondly, on legitimacy, what steps will the Government take to ensure that UK engagement does not confer legitimacy on what remains, in substance, a military regime operating under what it hopes is a civilian guise? Thirdly, on sanctions and co-ordination, will the Government commit to working with the United States and international partners to expand co-ordinated sanctions in three areas: oil and gas revenues, aviation fuel supply chains and financial measures against military-linked entities? Finally, in her role as UN penholder, can the Minister say how the UK is using its position to advance stronger and more consistent Security Council action on Myanmar?

The lesson from Burma is clear. Atrocity crimes do not emerge without warning. They develop through patterns that are visible, identifiable and preventable. The question is not whether we understand those patterns but whether we act on them. That means sustained pressure, refusing legitimacy to a regime built on violence and standing firmly with the people of Burma in their pursuit of a democratic future.

My Lords, I declare an interest as a patron of Redress. No one has done more in this House to persuade Governments to act decisively to prevent and stop atrocity crimes than the noble Lord, Lord Alton. His efforts, and the efforts of others—and here I must mention the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws—have ceaselessly attempted to insert amendments to any likely or relevant Bill that comes before this House. For example, amendments were tabled to what became the International Criminal Court Act 2001, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 and, of course, to the Trade Act 2021. They failed despite strenuous efforts on the part of my noble friend and widespread support in this House. For this, we all owe the noble Lord and his colleagues a debt of gratitude. But there is still a long way to go. The need for reform is long-standing and reflects a structural gap in UK law.

We have heard in clear terms what obligations the UK shoulders as a signatory to the international treaties that address atrocities. We know that Governments do not have to wait for a full-blown genocide, as happened in Rwanda in 1994. The onus is on Governments to act when there is a serious risk of genocide. The UK has not undertaken such preventive actions in recent years. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, also reminds us that we must consider war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the UK’s obligations arising from the UN responsibility to protect commitment, which was adopted by member states in 2025.

However, between 2000 and 2020, almost 40 countries experienced mass atrocities or serious concerns that they could take place imminently. Currently, atrocity crimes are at the centre of four UK foreign policy crises: Ukraine, Sudan, Israel and Palestine, and Iran. However, experience demonstrates that Governments—and perhaps too this Government—tend to ignore the facts of atrocity, such as the Daesh and Burmese military atrocities, which were reported by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, or the recommendations in the reports from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and the International Development Committee’s 2023 report on Srebrenica.

What might be the underlying reasons for this inaction? We have heard some of the answers. A straightforward answer could be that Governments sometimes go to extreme lengths to avoid taking actions to stop genocide and other atrocities, in part due to the international diplomatic and economic risks they entail. For example, it is reported that, during the Rwanda massacres, USA officials were advised not to use the term “genocide” precisely because to do so would have immediately invoked the duty to intervene.

For many years in the UK, a key mechanism for justifying such inaction has been the argument of who is competent to determine the fact of genocide—deemed, by the UK at least, to be a legal definition issued only by a ruling from the courts. However, in today’s world of information transfer, the evidence of genocide and other atrocities is recorded, verified and documented by any number of competent, internationally recognised bodies, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and several international human rights organisations, including well-attested local human rights organisations. If the Geneva conventions require action on the basis of a serious threat of genocide, there is absolutely no scarcity of reliable information. Once again, we ask the Government to return to remedies put forward in recent years and reconsider their adoption.

A Genocide Determination Bill, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, in 2022, empowered groups affected by atrocities, or representative organisations, to apply to UK courts for a judicial determination of genocide or the risk thereof. That Bill aimed to enable the courts, as a neutral arbiter, to make interim determinations of genocide and thereby get a faster response. That Bill, and others, failed due to a lack of time, among other reasons. Undeterred, the noble Lord has, as we have heard today, once again tabled a Genocide Determination Bill this morning. We wish him every possible success, and we will give him every possible support.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights produced two reports in 2025 recommending the adoption and incorporation of universal jurisdiction—a hugely important aspect of law in the fight against genocide. The adoption and incorporation of universal jurisdiction, as an amendment to the International Criminal Court Act 2001, would remove the requirement that alleged perpetrators of atrocities be British citizens or residents, which, in effect, allows Britain to be a safe haven for Putin’s henchmen, or indeed the Taliban. The principle of universal jurisdiction has yet to be incorporated into UK law. These reports and draft legislation offer varied mechanisms for preventive action.

Overall, we do not yet have a clear national strategy for the prevention of atrocities, which we desperately need. Such a strategy might include strengthening FCDO capacity to detect early warning indicators and to develop mechanisms for interventions. Among these must be the willingness to confront authoritarian states and anti-democratic statecraft as a national security priority. The goal must be to embed clear and transparent thresholds of threat and the triggers for action, and, in so doing, provide a lead for other departments—for example, the department for trade—in considering its own policies and action.

I want to end with a quote from a paper entitled A Dangerous Moment for UK Atrocity Prevention Policy from the organisation, Protection Approaches:

“Strategy, ambition and opportunity must triumph over hesitancy, absence of clarity regarding the UK policy position, lack of confidence and a reluctance to put forward creative policy options that centre on saving lives”.

My Lords, in the early 1990s, I worked in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, at Axum, which is more or less on the southern border with Eritrea. I was there for a few months as an archaeologist. Before I went, I did hardly any research about the area. My life at the time was travelling around the near East to different digs, and I had got a bit blasé about new countries, new currencies and new languages.

We were lodged in Axum in a very basic but secure hotel, a bit like a Roman house—three sides and well fenced with a big gate on the fourth side. On such digs, one worked with local people who also dig and while we worked, we chatted. The locals came across as subdued, very thin and did not talk much about their lives past or present. Much later, I realised, of course, that they were suffering from quite severe trauma.

The food at the hotel was very basic. After long days working at 6,000 feet—at one point, I had 12 small trenches open on a hillside, which meant quite a lot of exercise—we came back to almost always the same meal: boiled goat, pasta and tinned tomato sauce. I was vegetarian at the time but as I lost weight quite quickly, I began to eat the goat meat as well. Our hosts would go to the market, buy three little goats at a time and let them graze tethered together in the grass inside the hotel. Then, one day, there would just be two grazing and fresh, boiled goat on the menu. The lack of vegetables and fruit was not because the local people were not good at farming and growing but as a result of past burning of crops and destruction of trees and bushes—plus, of course, the denying of food from international organisations.

This was all caused by the conflict of a few previous years. For example, in 1989, there was an advance southward by the rebel forces of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF, a coalition led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front—the TPLF. The rebels thrust to within 100 miles of Addis Ababa and to fight the TPLF, the authorities forcibly conscripted tens of thousands of young men and boys, some as young as 13 or 14, in violation of international law and Ethiopian regulations on military service.

A year later, in 1990, there was a major defeat with the loss of the port town, Massawa—on the Red Sea coast to the north of Eritrea—to the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, the EPLF. Is everybody keeping up? During the fighting, 200 civilians were killed, many of them kept hostage as human shields by retreating government forces. Massawa was repeatedly bombed by government aircraft using napalm or phosphorus bombs, high explosives and cluster bombs. Main targets were places where civilian refugees were encamped outside the town.

About 25,000 tonnes of food donated by international humanitarian organisations were burned and the Government prevented a ship carrying relief supplies docking by threatening to attack it. On numerous occasions, soldiers in garrison towns near the front line arbitrarily opened fire on local residents, including women and children. Local women were forced to work as cooks, cleaners and prostitutes with the soldiers.

A year later, in 1991, there were killings of demonstrators who were protesting against the new EPRDF Government. A major humanitarian crisis developed as a result of the war, which led to a widespread famine—hence the food we were eating as archaeologists, but which was probably a lot better than what the local people were managing to eat. It also inflicted immense economic damage on the region, with the cost of rebuilding alone estimated to be tens of billions of pounds. But it was not a genocide, apparently.

Then, nearly three decades later, in 2020-22, there was an acknowledged genocide committed in Tigray. Estimates suggest 162,000 to 600,000 civilians were killed, with over 120,000 women raped and more than 6 million Tigrayans affected by violence, displacement and famine. More than 2.2 million people were displaced, and the destruction of healthcare and social infrastructure left the region in crisis, with maternal mortality rates quadrupling.

This is a deeply traumatised country. In 2024, the Australian Greens expressed deep concern over the continuing humanitarian crisis in Tigray, citing the New Lines Institute genocide report. They believe the actions of Ethiopian and Eritrean forces may constitute genocide and urge the Australian Government to support accountability. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this debate: we here must do the same, and I hope the Government listen to our debate.

I would also like to mention the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1916. Of the around 1.5 million Armenians who lived in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million were killed in massacres or individual killings, or died from systematic ill-treatment, exposure and starvation.

As of today, the UK does not officially recognise that genocide, as it is

“not for governments to decide whether genocide has been committed as this is a complex legal question”.

However, it

“recognises the terrible suffering that was inflicted on Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire and acknowledges the strength of feeling regarding this terrible episode of history”.

Well, that is good, then, that they recognise the suffering.

Of course, there is the genocide in Gaza, which other noble Lords have mentioned. There are recommendations for the Government from ActionAid which would end our Government’s complicity and uphold their obligations under international law. They should act urgently, consistently and concretely to prevent and respond to atrocity crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

To me, as someone who does not talk about this issue a lot—although I talk about human rights a lot—it seems a rather haphazard process as to when a humanitarian disaster becomes an atrocity, a massacre or a genocide. My view is that the UK must uphold international law consistently, support accountability wherever violations occur, and ensure it is never complicit in the crimes it claims to oppose. It really does not look like that at the moment.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Alton for arranging this debate today and for all the work he is doing with us and outside this House. I offer further congratulations on the Private Member’s Bill, which we will all support, as I am sure others will outside this House, too.

Crimes of atrocity are just awful. I have worked on this subject for decades. From the numerous debates, the important conversations in this House and my work as an adviser to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, I have come to know with absolute certainty that atrocity crimes do not start on the day this House or an international community notices them. There are always warning signs, like the targeting of minorities, the silencing of certain groups, dehumanising language, and very often the deliberate use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. The Georgetown Institute’s recent index, which has just been updated, shows the many countries throughout the world where there are signs of this happening.

The question, therefore, is not only how we recognise these crimes but how we use government policy and our global influence to prevent them escalating in the first place. For example, the G20 and the G7 are coming up, where we should be able to insist that this issue is on the agenda. We have an opportunity to put it on the agenda and keep it there.

July last year marked 20 years since we, as the international community, recognised the responsibility to protect, but between 2000 and 2020, at least 37 countries either certainly experienced or were highly likely to experience atrocity crimes of some nature. The world is now witnessing the highest number of armed conflicts. As my noble friend Lord Robertson says, the world is at war; it is witnessing the highest number of crimes since the end of the Second World War. Attacks on civilians and widespread violations of international humanitarian law are brazenly conducted with impunity. We have to do more to protect other countries and to enforce the law through the international courts and the global organisations of which we are a member.

In Ukraine, we know that civilians and children are being targeted and there are reports of abductions of Ukrainian children. In Sudan, the people of Darfur are persecuted and killed based on ethnicity, and there are well-established reports of rape and other forms of sexual violence. In Myanmar, the Rohingyas have suffered grievously; in Afghanistan, women and girls have been erased from public life; and in Gaza the suffering of civilians, especially women and children, is devastating. Unfortunately, this is to name just a few such cases. We have to put pressure on the international community to work against these atrocities.

I welcome the Government’s clear commitment to atrocity prevention, in particular through the work of the conflict and atrocity prevention department, which I hope will not be affected by the redistribution of funds and reorganisation of the FCDO. I welcome the Government’s stated intention to strengthen their ability to identify risks at the earliest possible stage, to uphold international law and to work with international partners to save lives.

Atrocity prevention is not the same as conflict prevention; it requires distinct skills, systems and tools. I hope that Ministers will ensure that our approach is cross-government and that our diplomats, experts, defence teams and specialists all have the training and political support necessary to act urgently, early and coherently. In the months ahead, I hope that Ministers will continue to strengthen a clear, cross-government approach to atrocity prevention. That means ensuring that our diplomats, development experts, defence teams and sanctions specialists have the tools, training and political support they need from the Government to identify risks early and act coherently.

I would like to take a moment to remind the Government that women, peace and security must remain central to the agenda. Women are, of course, both victims and survivors of atrocity crimes, but they are also the route to sustained peace through their work as peacebuilders, human rights defenders, mediators and early-warning actors. We must use their knowledge and expertise to shape our analysis, programming and diplomacy in those countries after peace is established. It is women who understand what is needed in development, health and education and for the long-term future of these countries. We know that where women sign peace agreements, those agreements stay.

I support the proposal advanced by my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, for a permanent international investigative commission on conflict-related sexual violence. Such a mechanism would help ensure that evidence is gathered properly, survivors are treated with dignity and sexual violence is investigated as a core feature of atrocity crimes, not as an afterthought.

My Lords, I declare my interest as per the register. I welcome this debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for introducing it and pay tribute to him and to the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, for giving voice to the survivors of atrocity crimes and pressing successive Governments to act before warning becomes catastrophe.

We cannot speak credibly about preventing genocide while disregarding existing mechanisms for confronting it: the genocide convention, the Rome statute, the international courts and international humanitarian law. Our problem is not the absence of legal frameworks but the absence of political will, moral clarity and preparedness to use what tools we have. As the United Nations Secretary-General recently warned, we are witnessing a dangerous erosion of respect for international law. Whatever view we hold of any individual conflict or of any individual state, the law cannot be selectively applied. Where grave violations occur, accountability must always follow, whoever the perpetrators are.

Genocide does not begin with mass killing, as others have said. It begins with dehumanisation, erosion of legal protections, impunity for attacks on civilians, and the use of sexual violence to terrorise communities, just to mention a few. Our recent history shows that prevention is possible, but only when states are prepared to act. In 1998, in Kosovo, we showed that timely international action saves lives. I am not arguing for military intervention. States have many other tools available to them: sanctions, arms embargoes, travel bans, effective diplomacy and legal action. We just have to be prepared to use them. Yet hesitation remains endemic. Each time the international community decides the moment to act has not yet arrived, the promise of “never again” grows weaker.

Today, warning signs are visible across multiple conflicts. I shall mention just a few. In Sudan, the United Nations and other independent bodies have documented credible allegations of ethnic massacres, widespread atrocities and conflict-related sexual violence. In El Fasher, survivors described armed men asking victims whether they were soldiers or civilians and then killing them regardless of the answer in conduct bearing “the hallmarks of genocide”.

In Gaza, we have watched restrictions on food and medical supplies, large-scale displacement, and credible allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law. The gravity of these concerns has been underscored by international organisations and legal experts, and even in some situations by members of the Israel Defence Forces. One soldier recently recalled that the word “civilian” was scarcely mentioned during operations. Others described practices that, if verified, entirely disregard the laws of armed conflict, including the alleged use of captured Palestinians as so-called “mosquitoes” in place of sniffer dogs to trigger booby traps.

In Xinjiang, systematic repression of Uyghurs continues, as well as of Protestants and other Christian groups, including pervasive surveillance, coercive social control, and restrictions on cultural and religious life.

More broadly, the latest report of the United Nations Secretary-General on conflict-related sexual violence records a dramatic increase in such crimes in countries like Russia, but also in democracies like Israel, which shows the moral collapse that is happening in that country. Conflict-related sexual violence is not incidental; it is deployed deliberately to force displacement and destroy the fabric of communities. The United Kingdom once led international efforts to confront these crimes through the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative. Our leadership must not be allowed to diminish; recently, it seems to have done so. I fully note and welcome the latest initiative by the Foreign Office on countering violence against women and girls, but we have to do more about this.

I put several questions to the Minister. First, what further steps will the Government take to strengthen the United Kingdom’s capacity to identify and respond to genocide and atrocity crimes at an early stage? I hope that parliamentary time will be made available for the noble Lord’s Private Member’s Bill, which I hope to support. Secondly, has the time come to update our policy on universal jurisdiction to ensure that the United Kingdom does not become a safe haven for individuals implicated in genocide, crimes against humanity and other serious international crimes, as others have pointed out? Thirdly, can the noble Lord say what exact mechanisms are used by the Government to ensure that the warnings from international investigators, courts and monitoring bodies trigger preventive action rather than retrospective expressions of concern?

Finally, will the Government reaffirm the United Kingdom’s commitment to preventing conflict-related sexual violence through its sustained support for documentation, accountability and international co-ordination? I hope that the Prime Minister will appoint a new special envoy on this issue, as this position has remained vacant since November last year, while the crimes have been increasing—and not because they have decreased or because we are in a better place. We are in a much worse place than we were last year.

The question is not whether we possess the legal instruments to confront and prevent genocide and crimes against humanity—we do; the question is whether we possess the resolve to use them in a timely way. Too often, the international community acts only after the worst has happened, and so do we. Prevention requires vigilance, consistency and the courage to uphold our principles.

In conclusion, I hope that your Lordships will not mind me reminding the House of the late Sir Alex Younger, whose distinguished public service reflected a profound understanding that national security and democratic values cannot be separated. As he put it:

“If we undermine the values we defend, even in the name of defending them, then we have lost”.

That warning reaches far beyond the world of intelligence and security; it applies with equal force to our response to war crimes. The credibility of international law rests not on the principles we proclaim in comfortable times but on our willingness to uphold them when doing so is hard.

My Lords, all of us are deeply indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who is like a dog with a bone—that is not a very noble metaphor, but I could not think of anything else—as he keeps on reminding us of the importance of these issues and the hard work that he does, not just in making a fine speech but behind the scenes in gathering people together, keeping us focused and reminding all of us of an aspect of the world we live in that is to be worried about. I am grateful to him and to other Members of this House for making us aware of atrocities that are being committed in different places around the world, the failures in our systems to deal with them, and the need for better measures in the future.

My observations will be of a more general nature. I have been a member of the delegation from this Parliament to the Council of Europe for the last five years, and I sit on its immigration committee. Less than three weeks ago, the Chisinău Declaration was put out—Chisinău is the capital of Moldova. It came from the Foreign Ministers of all the countries of Europe, who were convened to look at the problems relating to legislation, as it is embodied in national legislatures, that deals with immigration and the role of the European Court of Justice. A crisis has been perceived in Strasbourg about the erosion of aspects of our conventions dealing with refugees, asylum seekers and immigration in general. Around the continent, countries are taking different approaches to eating into some of the things that were provided all those years ago in the aftermath of the Second World War. The declaration is an attempt to make sense of all that and rally the troops around the core values that are at the heart of that convention.

At the Council of Europe, the Secretary-General, Mr Alain Berset, recognised that similar things are happening to democracy itself; the Council of Europe is dedicated to monitoring what happens in the fields of the rule of law, human rights and democracy. He established a democratic pact, which seeks, through all the agencies and institutions that come under the aegis of the Council of Europe, to take another look at how our democracies are working and whether there is a need to bring in changes and modifications and to once again rally the troops. These two things are happening in Strasbourg, and they have caused me to ask whether some similar exercise does not need to happen in relation to the mechanisms that emerged from the Second World War in the field of justice, the implementation of justice and the issues that we have been concerned about today.

After the Nuremberg trials, a convention was passed almost at once for the prevention and punishment of genocide. Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht had a similar and parallel proposal, which was to have a convention for the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity. Of course, 80 years later, we still do not have that. The United Nations has, I understand, over the last 15 years or so, been working on this, and several drafts have been put before it to make good that omission. The UN has promised that this year and next will be the years of working to bring such a convention for ratification in 2028.

All these different organisations exist, but public awareness of the European Court of Human Rights is negligible. Add to that what we think of the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the convention on genocide, and the ways in which we cope with the absence of a convention or treaty on crimes against humanity, and you have all the elements for a state of confusion—and certainly not for public awareness.

My holy text—it is good for a religious man to talk about holy texts—in this case is Philippe Sands’s book, East West Street, which is truly a fantastic piece of work. In the epilogue of that book, he talks about the ways in which he has litigated and been involved in various cases that deal with both crimes against humanity and genocide, and how it has come to pass that there is a kind of league fight between the two categories of crime and that the crime of genocide is placed—in what people seek in appropriate circumstances—above crimes against humanity. He feels that that puts a difficulty in the way of legislators. He finds it extremely difficult to litigate because he sees that the cases he pursues in court run, as a consequence, the risk of forming victims who consolidate their opposition and perpetrators who consolidate themselves in the position they are defending. In other words, they are producing two categories of people at loggerheads with each other, which is exactly what the cases are intended to solve.

I find all of this bewildering. I wish there was a commission—I do not know what you would call it—that would try to bring together the mechanisms and institutions at the heart of all these concerns in the ever-more complicated world in which we live, so that we could have more hope of consolidated, consequential and positive outcomes in the future. Debates such as this one remind us of the need for such clarification. One can only hope that perhaps His Majesty’s Government can solve all their problems by committing themselves to precisely that kind of outcome.

My Lords, the debate we are having today is an essential one, and my noble friend Lord Alton is to be congratulated on bringing us back to it, as he does regularly and with good reason. It is also a rather paradoxical debate. While the appalling crimes being committed around the world are not being reduced but rather are being intensified, the collective response of Governments is feeble and flawed.

In the first half of the 1990s, two completely horrendous genocides were committed, one at Srebrenica in Bosnia and the other in Rwanda. The international community was horrified, not least because of the inadequacy of its own response ahead of the crimes—for which, as Britain’s ambassador to the UN at the time, I feel some responsibility. The UN Security Council’s reaction then was strong. It established two international tribunals to identify and to try those who committed the crimes, and many of those are now in prison for the rest of their lives. Later in that decade, an International Criminal Court was established as a standing instance to try many of those crimes, and later still the International Court of Justice took up claims of genocide, on which it is still to give a ruling. So something was being done, with the hope of deterring these crimes and then bringing to justice the perpetrators of them.

However, since then, all the developments have been in a negative direction—going backwards. The UN Security Council has been blocked by abusive vetoes of several of its members, many significant member states have declined to join the International Criminal Court or to honour its rulings, and our principal ally, the United States, is doing its best to put the International Criminal Court out of business. This is a miserable record, and it is no wonder that the perpetrators of these crimes have not been deterred.

What needs to be done? First, there should be another attempt to get the UN Security Council to agree that, when genocide is at issue, a veto will not be in order. Such an attempt may not succeed, but those who block it should be required to take responsibility for their actions. I hope the Minister will say that the Government would support such an attempt. Secondly, if this cannot be agreed in the Security Council then the UN General Assembly, which takes its decisions by a majority and where vetoes do not apply, should be encouraged to express its views on these crimes and to bring to bear the court of international public opinion. Thirdly, can the Government not extract themselves from the Catch-22 of saying that it is only for a court to rule on the issue of genocide when no such decision is available, even when there is prima facie evidence that genocide is being committed? My noble friend Lord Alton raised that point again and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Collins, will respond to it.

Speaking as a non-lawyer myself, I feel that accusations of genocide are sometimes—I am not here speaking for one moment about those who have intervened in this debate or, above all, about my noble friend Lord Alton—thrown around too freely. There are plenty of war crimes and atrocities that are being committed which do not necessarily amount to genocide but which surely should be brought to international justice.

In conclusion, I trust that our Government will not conceal from the current US Administration how much we are dismayed by the vindictiveness of their proceedings against the International Criminal Court. Whether the US joins the Rome statute is a matter for it to decide, but the attacks it is directing at the ICC are hardly fitting for a country which established the international tribunals after the Second World War and which voted for the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals.

The matters we are debating are at the heart of our values in international affairs. I trust that we will promote them strongly in the period ahead and not always shelter behind rather complex legal arguments.

My Lords, about a year ago, I gave one of my first speeches in your Lordships’ House. It was in a debate also led by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on this very subject. I said then that, as a rookie Peer, my aspiration was to become more like him as I grow up. I am not sure how much progress I have made in the last year, but the aspiration remains.

When we discuss genocide, crimes against humanity and other atrocities, there is a tendency to call for justice and accountability after the event. Obviously accountability and justice matter, but prevention matters as much, if not more. For this reason, the genocide convention imposes a duty not merely to punish genocide but to prevent it. That duty does not begin after the horror has happened but before an atrocity occurs in the first place.

Commissioned in 2019 by the then Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, the Truro review examined the persecution of Christians around the world. However, its insights extend far beyond this one religion, and its recommendations explicitly call on government to protect and promote freedoms across every community. The author of the review, Bishop Philip Mounstephen, then Bishop of Truro and now the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester, regrets that he is not in his place today due to long-standing commitments. While I make a poor substitute, in his absence I remind the House of his excellent work.

This ground-breaking publication garnered praise and support from experts and leaders around the world. Following its publication in 2019, the Government accepted all recommendations and created the post of envoy for freedom of religion or belief within the FCDO. A central tenet of the review was the call for future Governments to recognise the warning signs of persecution and identity-based violence before they escalate into mass atrocities. Recommendation 7 calls for mechanisms to facilitate an immediate response to atrocity crimes, including genocide. It specifically highlights the need for early-warning mechanisms, preventive diplomacy and upstream prevention work.

My honourable friend in the other place, David Smith MP, who serves as the UK’s Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief, is doing fine work to advance the Government’s efforts. Only a few weeks ago, he was meeting with politicians, officials and faith leaders in Nigeria, a country which is experiencing an escalation in targeted attacks on different religious groups and a context where too many extremist groups are committing atrocities with impunity.

In another area, grant funding from the FCDO has enabled the BBC “Eye Investigations” unit to report powerfully on atrocity crimes. In response, the BBC faces continual resistance to this reporting. The former China correspondent John Sudworth told the “Today” programme that the corporation has

“faced threats of legal action as well as massive surveillance, obstruction and intimidation”

from Chinese authorities, all for its revelations of crimes against the Muslim Uyghurs. I hope that the Government will continue to support the BBC against such state-led threats and further encourage the BBC to report evidence of ongoing crimes despite threats from powerful regimes.

The question before us today is therefore not whether the Government are advancing the work outlined in the Truro review of 2019. They certainly are. The question is: what more could and should be done to prevent atrocities, crimes against humanity and, specifically, genocide? The evidence presented to Parliament over recent years suggests that serious gaps remain. We have seen repeated examples—from Iraq and Syria to Myanmar, Sudan, Afghanistan and elsewhere—of warning signs being missed or ignored long before atrocities reached their most devastating stage. The challenge does not simply concern a lack of information. Reports are produced. Evidence is gathered. Warnings are issued. The question is whether government has the institutional capacity to identify atrocity risks systematically, assess them consistently and ensure that Ministers receive clear recommendations for effective preventative action. That is precisely what recommendation 7 of the Truro report seeks to address.

There are of course international mechanisms that seek to provide such warnings. The United Nations has established the office of genocide prevention, which monitors risk factors and issues alerts. Independent organisations, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s early warning project, also assess countries at risk and publish regular forecasts. Yet these bodies do not possess the authority or operational reach to ensure that warnings are translated into timely action by states. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and others have repeatedly made clear in this debate, both in government and in opposition my noble friend the Minister has called on His Majesty’s Government to exercise leadership on the international stage. He has regularly called out bad actors and has sought to prevent atrocities wherever and whenever possible. I am hugely grateful for his efforts and have three questions for the Government in this debate.

First, following recent departmental restructuring, what has happened to the atrocity prevention functions that were previously located within the Office for Conflict, Stabilisation and Mediation, and the mass atrocity prevention hub? What dedicated atrocity prevention capability currently exists within the FCDO? Secondly, and in line with this, do the Government intend to publish a clear assessment of progress against recommendation 7 of the Truro review, setting out what has been implemented, what remains outstanding and how effectiveness is currently being measured? Thirdly, will my noble friend the Minister and the UK Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief host a private round table with Peers who have participated in this debate and those officials who are currently working on these issues to discuss them further?

Prevention is not only a legal obligation; it is also the most humane and ultimately the least costly response to atrocity crimes. When genocide occurs, the international community invariably asks why nobody acted sooner. The Truro review offered a practical answer to that challenge. It called for an early warning system, early engagement and early action. The Government deserve much credit for accepting that recommendation. But acceptance is only the beginning. The true test is implementation. If we are serious about preventing future atrocities, whether against Christians, Muslims, Yazidis, Rohingya, Uyghurs or any other vulnerable community, we must ensure that the commitments already made are translated into enduring institutions, clear processes and effective action.

I hope the Government will use this debate to reaffirm the commitment and to demonstrate how recommendation 7 is being taken forward in practice. Prevention delayed is prevention denied. Put simply, the best time to stop an atrocity is before starts.

My Lords, I welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on securing it and on the manner in which he moved today’s Motion. This of course follows the First Reading earlier today of the Genocide Determination Bill—a Private Member’s Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Alton—to provide an avenue for justice to victims of the crime of genocide, which is also a topic of concern to me.

In the few minutes available today, I wish to focus on avenues for justice and accountability for international crimes. There is one particular case on which I wish to focus—a case which I have previously raised in this Chamber—relating to the tragic death of Ryan Evans of Wrexham, who was working for Reuters in Ukraine in August 2024, covering alleged atrocities committed by the Russians in Ukraine. The hotel in which the Reuters team was staying was hit by a Russian missile. Ryan was killed and nine others were injured.

I raised this by way of an amendment to the then Crime and Policing Bill, but we were unable at that stage to persuade the Government to adopt it. The reply I received in that debate made me question whether the Government understand what a victim/survivor-centric response to international crimes means, or indeed what victim/survivor-centric justice should look like.

On that day in February, I was told that the UK Government are already doing a lot to support justice and accountability in Ukraine, such as providing training for lawyers, judges and others. However, even now I have received no response as to what the Government are doing to provide justice and accountability for Ryan’s family. So what have the present UK Government done to support Ryan’s family in their pursuit of justice and accountability for his premature and unlawful death?

As it is, the families of such victims are left powerless. This is totally at odds with the victim/survivor-centric approach that the Government have always stressed. In all seriousness, what do the Government expect the family of Ryan Evans to do? Seek justice in Ukraine? There must surely be an easier way. The UK Government may be aware that, while the law in this country does not allow it, other countries have managed to find a way to ensure that their citizens, as victims and survivors of international crimes abroad, can seek justice through their domestic courts. This is called a passive personality jurisdiction and it allows a state to prosecute foreign nationals for crimes committed abroad when the victim is a citizen of that prosecuting state. It is the citizenship of the victims/survivors that is the critical factor.

Such laws exist in France, Germany, Spain, Canada and Lithuania among others. Indeed, Lithuania is investigating the killing of its own citizen, Mantas Kvedaravičius, who was killed by the Russian military in Mariupol. In February 2024, the prosecutor-general of Lithuania announced that three soldiers had been identified as suspects and charged with the killing of Mantas. Why would we not want to help our citizens seek justice before our domestic courts? Why can other countries find a more humane solution than we can? If a small country such as Lithuania—the size of Wales—can do it, surely it is not beyond the capability of the UK to do likewise. Is it just a matter of not having the political commitment to deliver justice for UK citizens caught in such tragic circumstances?

I tabled a Bill for these purposes in the Private Members’ Bill ballot earlier this year but was unsuccessful. However, I will continue to seek opportunities to press for British citizens who are victims of international crimes to have clear avenues for justice and accountability. I do so in memory of Ryan, for his family, and for future victims and their families, all of whom will suffer the same challenges until the law in the UK is changed.

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend Lord Alton of Liverpool for never having stopped keeping up the pressure on enhancing our awareness of human rights, often at great personal expense to himself and his family. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for his support going back many years when we first exposed the issue of illegal organ harvesting and transplantation. It is on that topic that I will focus, because it is a despicable side-effect of some of the terrible killings that go on around the world.

In 2024, across the world, it was estimated that 173,727 organs were transplanted overall, 47,000 of which came from deceased donors. Those figures are from international data submitted to the Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation. When you look at Great Britain, the UK, Ireland and the USA, the figures are comprehensive and properly registered. When you look at other countries that we have been discussing today, the data columns are very often blank the whole way down—nothing is declared. There are figures given by China, but I will come on to those in a moment.

The problem has been that the demand for organs has outstripped the supply through legal ethical routes. I declare my interest as a patron in establishing the Commonwealth Tribute to Life through NHS Blood and Transplant, which has been trying to ensure that there are ethical transplant practices across the whole Commonwealth. We have had some success, with memorandums of understanding and a decrease in the sale of organs, particularly kidneys. But it is very hard to get a full picture because of the secret nature of this activity.

Organ harvesting involves illegally removing parts of a body for transplant for commercial gain with or without the victim’s so-called consent. Of course, under modern slavery laws, a victim cannot consent to their own exploitation.

The China Tribunal in 2020, set up by Sir Geoffrey Nice, again with enormous courage, revealed very much of what was going on in China. He found that waiting times were short—days or weeks—in places where voluntary donation systems could not possibly have been providing all the organs that were used and documented the problem of Falun Gong practitioners being targeted since 1999 and the mass detention of people in Xinjiang province with forced medical screenings and biometric analysis. There was direct and indirect evidence of forced organ harvesting. Survivors who managed to escape Chinese custody have provided accounts, including to the British Medical Journal, detailing unconsented practices and very narrow escapes from surgery.

Internationally, most of the victims seem to be men, with about two-thirds of reported cases involving men whose organs have been taken. That is UN data. The victims are poor, uneducated or unemployed. They are often asylum seekers, refugees or from minority backgrounds. Shockingly and surprisingly, north Africa and the Middle East have the highest share of detected victims, as reported by the United States Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for raising the issue of children caught up because, horrifically, children are being trafficked for their organs globally. There are reports of teenage girls having their ovaries harvested unknowingly to be trafficked for profit. Some of the anecdotal reports come out of Nigeria.

However, victims are mostly men, leaving women and girls without a provider for their families. Female spouses become obliged to donate their organs because the man in the family, the breadwinner, is ill or has perhaps died. Adult women have been trafficked, for their ovaries and their eggs.

In Afghanistan in 2023, 459 kidney transplants were documented. However, the United Nations estimated that 59% of the population was in need of life-saving humanitarian aid, so the pressure on people to donate was phenomenal. In 2021, a mother was quoted as saying:

“My children roam on the streets begging … If I don’t sell my kidney, I will be forced to sell my one-year-old daughter”.

More recently, the state has said that it is un-Islamic to undertake any organ transplantation, and it is notable that the latest return, for 2024, to the observatory shows no kidneys. I do not believe that it is a zero; it is just completely hidden.

I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Nye, for highlighting Burma. In Myanmar, young people are removed and killed, and in the morning when their body has been left outside their family’s door, it is often found that they have been opened and seem to have had their organs stripped out. There seem to be fast-track routes through some of the airports for organs to be taken to China for transplantation. What has China’s response been? Beijing initially denied accusations but admitted in 2015 that it had routinely harvested organs from executed death row prisoners. Now the Chinese Government assert that they completely ended that practice in 2015 and that they rely entirely on voluntary citizen donation systems. There is an enormous worry about how so-called consent is obtained.

The United States has the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act to impose property blocking and sanctions. The European Union has passed resolutions requiring member institutions to evaluate aggressively and to sever medical training and research collaboration with such teams. The National Institutes of Health has historically published statements from first-hand witnesses and imposed medical sanctions. I feel that my professional group needs to ensure that the World Medical Association takes this much more seriously because, far too often, healthcare professionals are intimately involved through threats, intimidation and fear for their own family and may possibly be killed if they do not participate in this signal of overwhelming abuse around the world.

Like other noble Lords, I am in awe of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for his patience and persistence in keeping the question of atrocity prevention before this Chamber. I thank him and indeed all those who have spoken. It is not my intention to repeat any of what has already been said: rather, I shall go deeper into the area of the relationship between conflict prevention and overseas aid.

The wholesale dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development has given us for the first time something close to a controlled experiment in what happens when a major donor abruptly walks away from fragile states. A study published last month in Science examined 870 subnational regions across most of the African continent in the 10 months before and after USAID came to an abrupt stop. Using a difference-in-differences design, it compared places that had been heavily reliant on USAID with otherwise comparable places that had not.

Before January 2025, the trends in violent conflict in the two groups moved in step. After January 2025, they diverged sharply. In the most exposed regions, the probability of a violent conflict event rose by roughly 6.5%. In some subnational analyses, conflict events and combat deaths rose by about 10%. This translates, on the authors’ own conservative estimates, into roughly 1,000 additional deaths from armed violence in a single calendar year, and that is before we count the indirect mortality from collapsed clinics, interrupted food programmes and displacements, all of which are estimated to lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under the age of five.

Another study conducted by Jimmy Graham, a genocide and atrocity prevention research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, finds the same headline result, but he also notes that civilian unrest increased first, followed by armed violence, which suggests that the increase in conflict was not just a coincidence but rather a response to institutional weakening. Graham also argues that the withdrawal of aid acts as a signal of short-term state weakness. Rebels, militias and other armed actors infer, with good reason, that the state has just been deprived of a major source of administrative capacity, basic service delivery and economic stability, all of which gives them a window of opportunity.

That evidence should concern us greatly, because we too are embarking on significant further cuts to our aid budget. By next year, UK aid spending will fall to 0.3% of GNI, reducing proportionate aid spending to levels not seen since the late 1990s, and the total value of FCDO programmes will fall by 31% compared with 2025-26. The Government will tell the House that the share of bilateral aid going to fragile and conflict-affected states is rising, and that is correct, but it is rising against a sharply shrinking total, and the rise is achieved largely by protecting four countries—Ukraine, Sudan, Palestine and Lebanon—while the other 34 fragile states share a much smaller pot. Bond’s analysis finds that bilateral aid to Africa will have fallen by 56%, or £874 million, by 2028-29 compared with 2024-25, and the UK Integrated Security Fund, the principal instrument for stabilisation and peacebuilding, has already been cut by one-third in a single year.

Yet, at precisely the same moment, Ministers rightly tell us that the world is becoming more dangerous. As we have already heard, we face instability in Sudan, catastrophe in Gaza, conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, worsening food security across the Horn of Africa, and growing geopolitical competition in fragile states across the Balkans, the Sahel and the Indo-Pacific. If the world is indeed becoming more dangerous, this is surely the wrong moment to dismantle one of the principal instruments through which Britain has historically reduced instability peacefully.

So I ask the Minister: will the Government set out a credible path back to 0.7%? The 2016 Act remains on the statute book. The commitment remains in the Prime Minister’s own words, but a commitment with no timetable lacks resolution. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that, where bilateral programmes are being wound down, they are wound down in a sequenced way: strengthening local institutions, transferring capacity to domestic authorities and civil society, and giving partners reasonable notice, so that the reduction in UK presence does not itself become a driver of instability? Atrocity prevention requires more than public statements and diplomacy after violence has begun. It requires sustained investment in the conditions that make atrocities less likely in the first place.

My Lords, it is pleasure to speak immediately after the right reverend Prelate, and to share these Benches’ support for his call to reinstate the 0.7% for overseas aid as soon possible. If the Minister is able to give any insight into that, that would be very welcome, because, as the right reverend Prelate has just said, words are never enough. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, about the dangers of democratic backsliding and other phenomena. So there is a range of issues that we need to think about this afternoon at the end of a very powerful debate.

As always, I pay tribute to my friend the noble Lord, Lord Alton. We have already heard that the noble Lord, Lord Rook, aspires to be like the noble Lord, Lord Alton. He also wants to be, perhaps, a deputy Bishop and did the work of presenting the words of the former Bishop of Truro and his report very effectively. As many noble Lords will realise, one of the things to which you would have to aspire, to be like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is to be utterly persistent and to ensure that, whenever there is a scintilla of hope that somebody might be willing to speak in a debate, you will keep coming and saying, “Could you just do this?” The noble Lord is so passionate about the causes that matter.

The causes on which he speaks, including bringing us today’s debate and introducing another Private Member’s Bill, are always of the most profound importance: literally, matters of life and death. They are issues on which we find it very easy to agree that there is a need to speak. Across the Chamber, we may find many points of convergence, but so often there is one person or one group of people who seems to find it so very difficult to support what the noble Lord and other noble Lords have said in the debate. I am hoping today that I might be proved wrong, and that the Government Benches might be willing to say, “You’re right. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, has brought such a compelling case and his Private Member’s Bill is so important that we are going to give it a fair wind”.

We have heard this afternoon about the difficulty that we, and the other place, have faced over the years when suggesting that a case may be one of genocide. The response from the Government Front Bench is always, “A very difficult case—we agree there’s a problem, but we can’t name it as a genocide. That is for the courts to decide”. The response of the courts is, “We can’t determine a genocide, because we need some legal basis on which to do that, beyond the general international law norms”. I very much hope that the Minister might be able to suggest that he can be a little more open, and that the Government might welcome a very useful Private Member’s Bill that is on its way.

“Never again” were the words with which I planned to open my speech. My noble friend Lord Hussain did so in his speech, because they were the words that were proclaimed immediately after World War II and after the Holocaust. When we had the convention on genocide, its words had the important contribution of Raphael Lemkin, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, earlier, and there was the work of Hersch Lauterpacht on crimes against humanity. It was “never again”, and yet, 80 years on, we see so frequently cases that are clearly atrocity crimes.

I am very mindful of the words of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. He said that we need to be careful about calling too many things genocide; perhaps we use that word too casually. But it is important for us to find a way, as a country, and to be able to be reassured that the Government are mindful of all their duties under the convention on genocide. It is not simply about naming a genocide or just about punishing one, if a court is eventually able to agree that one has been perpetrated. It is also, as we have heard this afternoon, about preventing genocide.

That might sound a very large demand, and it is. I am very grateful for a briefing that I was sent by Ewelina Ochab, who has already been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, in which there is a reminder that in 2007, in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v Serbia and Montenegro, the judgment stated that the duty to prevent genocide is to be triggered when the state

“learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed”.

Even in the 1930s, if the word genocide had existed, people would have been able to see that there was a genocide of the Jewish people—and that was in the days before mass media and mass, instantaneous communication.

We now have many more opportunities to be aware of potential atrocities, crimes against humanity and genocide. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm this afternoon whether he feels that the Government have all the tools they need to be aware of genocides that may be being perpetrated, or where there is a serious risk of genocide, because that is clearly a duty for this Government and for our country. From the first speech by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, onwards, we have heard references to a whole series of cases where there are clearly crimes of atrocity. Whether or not they are genocides, there are crimes that need to be investigated and explored: in Sudan; with the Uyghurs in China; the case of the Rohingya; and the situation in the Middle East, where there are allegations that clearly need to be looked into. If there is nothing to see then no crime will be found, but there is at least a duty to explore cases where perhaps there may be genocide or crimes against humanity.

One case I would like to touch on before I conclude is Afghanistan. Just under five years ago, NATO troops withdrew from Afghanistan. We had played a crucial role there. When we left, we left behind many vulnerable people: women and girls, who have been mentioned, and members of the judiciary, for whom the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, did fantastic work. But the end of May marked 1,717 days since restraints on women’s education began, and over 500 days since women have no longer been able to train as midwives in Afghanistan. On 14 May this year, the Taliban had a decree on the principles of separation between spouses; this legalises child marriage and establishes different standards of consent for girls and boys who are minors. Under the decree, a minor girl’s silence is treated as consent to marriage, whereas a boy at least has explicitly to accept or reject such marriage. There is also a decree that can essentially take away the property of Afghans who are currently out of the country. Why might they be out of the country? It is precisely because they have fled for their lives from the Taliban. As a country, we still owe a duty to many Afghan refugees and to those still in Afghanistan. What is His Majesty’s Government doing to support them?

My Lords, I will add to the paeons of praise for the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and all his tireless campaigning. He is the epitome of the phrase “campaigning Peer”. His treatment by foreign governments demonstrates just how effective his campaigning is; he has done some very important work, of which we are all in awe. I look forward to working with him in the new Session on tackling some of the most appalling crimes committed by state actors, terror groups and others across the world.

The Official Opposition are unequivocal: atrocity crimes should never go unpunished, wherever they take place. As my noble friend Lady Sugg reminded us, the previous Government took a number of steps to tackle global war atrocities—not least of which in Ukraine, following the appalling crimes that have been committed in that conflict, including in Bucha. The images from there are impressed on all our memories, and the victims of those crimes deserve justice. I am very proud that the last Government, working with our US and EU partners, established the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine. That work is ongoing. I know that my noble and learned friend Lady Prentis of Banbury continues to play an active role in the efforts to bring the perpetrators of war crimes in that conflict to justice.

We on this side of the House will always back the Government when they are supporting efforts to prosecute atrocities and genocide committed in other countries. I am pleased to say that Britain’s values and principles of law are respected across the world, and from that flows respect and legitimacy. It is surely right that we use our high reputation in justice as a force for good on the international stage. Given the important role that Britain has established over many years, we have a unique contribution to make in many parts of the world affected by instability, terrorism and war.

In that context, I ask the Minister to update the House on the Government’s current assessment of the terrible situation in Sudan. We were all appalled by the massacre at the El Fasher hospital. As many others have said in this debate, the conflict in Sudan has left hundreds of thousands of people dead, and indeed millions affected by famine. The UK has long experience in supporting the prosecution of atrocities and war crimes perpetrated abroad. In addition to the diplomatic efforts made by the Government to seek an end to the conflict, what steps are Ministers taking to ensure that the UK can support the prosecution of atrocities committed in that conflict?

Another important point—emphasised by my noble friend Lady Sugg—is that we should never forget that atrocities are not committed just in conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Sudan. Sadly, there are many states that are committing atrocities against their own people in the world today. It would not be right for us to discuss those atrocities perpetrated by states without reflecting on China’s treatment of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, as the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, did so effectively. The evidence is clear, and we must all be united in our condemnation of China’s actions.

Across this House, we all cherish our freedoms. China appears to have no regard for the rights and freedoms of the Uyghur people, and we firmly support the campaign for justice of the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool. Can the Minister reassure the House that the Government will continue to hold the Chinese Government to account for their persecution of the Uyghur people? Can he reassure the House that the Government will work to ensure that our procurement processes are robust in prohibiting the purchase of the products of slave labour, however difficult they are to identify?

On Hong Kong, what are the Government doing to monitor the Chinese state’s actions against Hong Kongers? We all want to see Jimmy Lai released, so can the Minister update the House on the representations that the Government are making to the Chinese Government for his release? Of course, at the same time it is also important to protect the residents of Hong Kong who have come to the UK since China breached the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. Can the Minister update the House on the steps that the Government are taking to support those people in the UK?

Finally, now that the internet has been partly restored, the evidence of massacres perpetrated by Iran against its own people is growing. The images of families seeking to identify their loved ones who have been killed by the regime, which we saw earlier this year—there have been some recent images released as well—are profoundly moving. Can the Minister say whether the Government are taking steps to support any evidence gathering in relation to these atrocities? Does he believe that there will be an opportunity to hold the perpetrators to account in the coming years?

Britain has an important role to play in championing the causes of tolerance, freedom, respect and justice across the world. We cannot discuss all areas of conflict today, although many have been raised. Many people are still suffering in an increasingly unstable world, and I support so many of the heartfelt sentiments that have been expressed across the House in our debate today. We must never waver in our ambition to stamp out hatred, discrimination, atrocities and genocide across the world, and, where it does occur, we must not flinch in our efforts to deliver justice for the victims. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response, and particularly how he will justify the actions of the Government in light of his previous statements. I look forward to his statements.

I thank the noble Lord. I add my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for initiating this debate and for his continued work on human rights and civil liberties. He and I may not have always agreed on the means, but the one thing that we have been absolutely at one on is the ends: we want to see an end to this sort of behaviour. There will always be differences on the means. As the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, has frequently said to me, his positions in government often changed when he moved into opposition. Sometimes that happens in reverse.

This has been an incredibly comprehensive debate, and it is going to be very difficult for me to cover every one of the issues that have been raised. I know that we will study Hansard carefully and, if I fail to address any particular point, we will write and put a letter in the Library.

How we use the full weight of policy to prevent the gravest crimes known to humanity is among the most serious responsibility of any Government. Across the world, we are witnessing a deeply troubling rise in conflict and instability. From Sudan to Ukraine and from Gaza to Myanmar, the human cost is devastating. In the face of such suffering, it is right that this House considers how government policy can respond more effectively both to prevent these crimes and to ensure accountability when they occur.

The UK Government’s approach rests on the clear principle that preventing and responding to atrocity crimes must be embedded across our foreign, development and security policy. This is not an isolated issue; it is integral to how we promote stability, uphold international law and protect human rights. Our policies are therefore designed to operate across three mutually reinforcing areas: preventing atrocity risks from emerging or escalating; responding decisively where crimes occur or are imminent; and strengthening accountability and justice mechanisms to deter future violations.

Before I address those three areas, I remind the House that on Human Rights Day 2024, the Government identified five key priorities that very much reflect how this debate has gone. The first priority was about defending civic space and fundamental freedoms. By the way—noble Lords have heard me say this—one of the most important ingredients of a healthy democracy is a vibrant civil society; it enables people to hold their Governments to account. This Government are committed to supporting civil society organisations.

The second priority—again, noble Lords have raised this issue—is the upholding of the rule of law. We are committed to the institutions that promote the international rule of law, including the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the OSCE. We need to build broad alliances and to listen to the views of others, even when we disagree. It matters that perpetrators of atrocities know that justice awaits them, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, knows. That is why we strongly support an effective and independent ICC.

The third priority is to champion equal rights for all. Stalling progress on the rights of women and girls, LGBT+ people and those belonging to other marginalised groups is troubling, and it is increasing. We must, more than ever, stand in solidarity with them, and we will advocate for the rights and freedoms of women and girls at every opportunity. This fundamentally includes sexual and reproductive health rights, which are very much under threat at this moment in time.

By championing the freedom of religion or belief for all, we are fighting back against the threats so many people face simply for what they do or do not believe in. The UK special envoy for VAWG, David Smith—my noble friend Lord Rook has mentioned him—launched his strategy last year and gave an excellent timetable for work, which focused on recommendation 7 of the Truro report. We are making progress; we will deliver on that. I am sure that David Smith will be the open to the suggestion of meeting with noble Lords, and I will certainly convey that idea to him.

The fifth and final priority is to respond to the global challenges by prioritising human rights and governance principles, working to end all forms of modern slavery and promoting business and human rights—these things go together and I have strongly argued for them. When I was Minister for Africa, in every African country I went to, I said that if their first priority is economic growth, how do they deliver it? They deliver it with an inclusive workforce that includes delivering on the rights of women. That is what we need to do.

I now turn to those three areas I mentioned, the first of which is prevention. Preventing these crimes depends on early, informed and co-ordinated action. Government policy prioritises building a deep understanding of risk. The UK undertakes rigorous cross-government analysis of conflict and instability, drawing on diplomatic reporting, expert insights and global data. This allows us to identify the drivers of violence, including political exclusion of specific groups of people, weak governance, identity-based tensions or a history of impunity. Our global network of diplomatic missions plays a vital role in this effort, and I have seen this across many continents. Colleagues on the ground, supported by specialist advisers and analysis, provide real-time insights into emerging risks and help to shape targeted responses. This ensures that our policy decisions are based on evidence and focused on where they can have the greatest impact to prevent atrocities.

To protect sensitive intelligence sources and prevent hostile actors from exploiting strategic vulnerabilities, many of our assessments, including the Joint Analysis of Conflict and Stability, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and my noble friend Lady Kennedy, must remain confidential. Last year, I invited both the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and my noble friend to talk about the review we were doing on the JACS process, which has been a very positive thing.

Prevention also means tackling the root causes of violence, with a focus on areas where analysis identifies those at greatest risk. For example, we support peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts in fragile and conflict-affected regions, helping to address long-standing grievances. We invest in strengthening institutions, promoting the rule of law and countering disinformation and hate speech. We also work to advance gender equality and protect the rights of women and girls, recognising that gender-based violence is not just abhorrent in its own right but also a very big warning sign of broader risks of atrocities. Through our contributions on multilateral mechanisms, including UN peacebuilding efforts, we are building that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Helic, raised PSVI and gender-based and sexual violence in conflict. I pay tribute to her for her excellent work. I have been absolutely committed to the PSVI work we have undertaken. We are making very good progress in terms of renewing our commitments beyond 2026, which we will do. The noble Baroness is right: we need a replacement for the excellent previous special representative on PSVI, and I very much hope that will be announced fairly shortly.

I was in Costa Rica for the inauguration of the new president there, where I met representatives of the UN agencies with whom we were giving financial support to the survivors of sexual violence in three countries in Latin America. I was really impressed with the impact of that. Of course, the key to that has been our absolute focus on a survivor-centred approach, listening to the people who are most affected, responding to them and building that programme.

In relation to Tigray, I had the opportunity to go there and meet the survivors of sexual violence, to understand what they wanted, not only in terms of ensuring accountability but also in how they can rebuild their lives and not suffer the associated stigma. That is why people use sexual violence in conflict—they know it has a stigmatising effect, and that is what we have to properly address.

The second area is how we respond, which is and must be decisive. Where risks escalate and atrocities occur, the Government act swiftly and in co-ordination with partners. The UK uses diplomatic channels to raise concerns directly with states and to press for de-escalation. We work through international institutions, including the UN, to raise the alarm, build consensus and co-ordinate action. Of course, this includes the Human Rights Council, where, for example, on 16 March our human rights ambassador raised the UK’s deep concern, which many noble Lords have raised, around the situation in Xinjiang. We have repeatedly used the Human Rights Council—because we can win votes there, by the way, beyond simply the Security Council; I accept what people are saying in relation to the situation in the Security Council.

Many noble Lords raised Sudan. The UK’s commitment to atrocity prevention in Sudan is unequivocal and long-standing, and we consistently monitor emerging risks, press the parties to the conflict for restraint and urge compliance with international humanitarian law. The Foreign Secretary has made it a priority. We must try to absolutely focus on this issue to ensure that it is not pushed down the global agenda, as we know it has been. The UK, as a leader of the core group on Sudan at the UN Human Rights Council, led efforts to renew the UN fact-finding mission mandate in October—the only UN mechanism investigating violations across Sudan.

This year, we supported the deployment of specialist sexual and gender-based violence investigators, to strengthen accountability specifically on conflict-related sexual violence so that we can hold the perpetrators to account. On 6 May, the atrocity prevention coalition issued a joint statement calling out the risk of escalation in and around Dilling in South Kordofan, pressing the warring parties to guarantee unimpeded access. I know these are words, and the situation in Sudan is dreadful, but we must make sure that it does not go down the global agenda.

On accountability, a central pillar of government policy is supporting international efforts to ensure that those responsible for atrocity crimes are held accountable. This is clear in Ukraine, where we have played a leading role in supporting the Ukraine Government to document crimes and pursue justice, including through co-operation with international partners and others. In Myanmar, the British embassy in Yangon is at the forefront of efforts to address the culture of impunity that is fuelling cycles of violence, as my noble friend Lady Nye mentioned.

Achieving justice can be challenging. Too often, the path is long and difficult—I know that that is the case in relation what the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, said. I reassure him that it is not that we do not think there is accountability, but when crimes are committed, it is vital that we support the opportunity to gather evidence. You cannot pursue a trial without proper evidence, and that is a key element of our work. I am not dismissing in any way the nature of these crimes, but if we are to hold people accountable, that system is really important.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who asked about the case brought by the Gambia in relation to Myanmar. From what I understand, in March 2025, the UK submitted written observations to the ICJ in the case brought by the Gambia for alleged breaches of the genocide convention. The UK’s intervention presented legal arguments regarding the interpretation of certain provisions of the genocide convention. We have trusted that this will help the court when considering these provisions.

The Gambia v Myanmar proceedings have now moved beyond the oral hearings on the merits, which concluded in January of this year, and we are now into the court’s deliberative phase. It remains the United Kingdom’s position that a determination of genocide should be made by the competent court or tribunal, and we welcome the ICJ’s consideration of the issues in relation to Myanmar’s obligations under the convention. However, the status of the arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing is a matter for the court, which is independent, and we will not interfere with its processes.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, said, it is important to emphasise that no country can address these issues and these challenges alone; it is how we work with others that is vital. That is why our actions are grounded in multilateral co-operation. We work closely with partners and share information. Those returning from conflict in Syria or Iraq must expect to be met at the UK border by counterterrorism policing, interviewed and, where relevant, investigated to determine whether they have committed criminal offences.

I am about to run out of time, but I want to address some fundamental issues. I acknowledge what the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said about organ harvesting. These things are happening without public knowledge, and they are atrocities we need to address. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, also raised UN processes, particularly on the UN vote veto. The UK Government were proud to co-sponsor the veto initiative that enables the UN General Assembly to scrutinise the use of the veto. We support the accountability, coherence and transparency code of conduct through which we have committed not to vote in the UN General Assembly against a credible draft resolution to prevent or end a mass atrocity.

I conclude by saying that the role of government policy in combating atrocity crimes is profound and far-reaching. I know what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has said about his genocide Bill, and he knows my response: we will not be supporting it. But we share the same ends. People need to be held accountable for atrocity crimes, and we need to ensure that we have the means to do that. I want to put the sort of effort that we have been doing successfully into supporting all those agencies which are gathering the necessary evidence, and where that evidence has been able to be presented to a competent court, we will do our utmost to support it. The Government are determined that we raise these issues, and I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord for having this debate and for putting his Bill forward for consideration. I wanted to hear the response of the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, but he has gone now; he has obviously escaped in time. Anyway, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for initiating this debate. It has been incredibly broad ranging, but very important for the future of mankind and womankind.

My Lords, I am greatly encouraged to have heard our House speak so powerfully, so eloquently, and with such a united voice about our determination to tackle atrocity crimes in whatever vestige they may come, whether it is outright genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes. I was obviously disappointed to hear the final remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury. As he said, he and I want to see the same ends, so I was disappointed to hear him say that he is unable at the present moment to support the Genocide Determination Bill. He has heard the Opposition Front Benches, and I was extremely grateful to my noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham and to the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, for what they had to say and for the support the Bill has been given, particularly by people like the noble Baronesses, Lady Helic and Lady Sugg, in their remarks today.

There will be a debate about the Bill on 15 July. We are in continued discussion. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of the Shaws, and I met with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, the Attorney-General. We have questions for the Lord Chancellor, David Lammy, around this and universal jurisdiction. I hope that the conversation will remain open, because we cannot have it both ways. We cannot say, as the Minister did in his last remarks, that we will abide by the determination of a court if we then rule out the opportunity of the High Court of England and Wales and the Court of Session in Scotland being able to do that, which is why my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead, helped to devise the terms of the Bill.

I hope that, given that the vetoes that we heard referred to by my noble friend Lord Hannay, will always be used by Russia or China when you seek to refer to a case, such as that of the Uyghur Muslims, or even the United Nations’ own commission of inquiry into North Korea, which called for a referral to the ICC, it has not gone forward because of the threat of the use of veto. My noble friend was right that the United Kingdom should revisit this question, even if it is only to call out the countries that would block such referrals. The French floated this idea some time ago. We should work with them to try and make sure that it is placed before the Security Council—something, I know, that would be close to the heart of the Minister.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, said that we needed clarity, resources and urgency. The point about resources was underlined by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester. It takes me back to my student union days, when I argued for Resolution 2626—the United Nations resolution calling for 0.7% of our gross national product to be provided in development aid. The noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, has an incredibly honourable record on this. Not many people leave government over a matter of principle. I enormously admire her for putting her beliefs into action in that way. She is right: we must understand what impact this is having on things such as the atrocity prevention strategy. I hope, therefore, that when the letter comes from the Minister that something more can be said about whether this impact of resources will affect capacity and the size of the hub.

Many Peers echoed the call for a cross-departmental and cross-government strategy, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, and others. We were told that it is a core question. Many lamented the absence of a national strategy. The scale of the challenge was underlined by the noble Baronesses, Lady Helic and Lady Nye, my noble friend Lady D’Souza, the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, and others. The re-vivification of the conventions was a point that the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, made, and it was echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith.

Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin were called in aid. I had the privilege of visiting Simele in northern Iraq, which is where Lemkin went in the early 1930s to understand what had happened to the Assyrians and Armenians. It was on that basis that he started to think about crafting something to try and deal with atrocity crimes. More than 40 of his own family members were murdered in the Holocaust. Churchill said that there is no word sufficient in our language to capture the scale, the monstrosity of the crimes that have been committed. Lemkin gave us that word: genocide—the cutting of the human family. In every generation, we owe it to the founding fathers and mothers of that period—from Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Winston Churchill and the many senior figures in the Conservative Party and the Labour Party at that time who promoted the European Convention on Human Rights, on which the noble Lord, Lord Rook, spoke when I had a debate on that subject. It is a great pleasure for me to be able to pass the baton on to the noble Lord, who has more than grown into his own shoes. I am particularly pleased that he has joined us on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, where he is already making quite a mark.

In the 1930s, we saw, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, said, the growth of crimes that nobody responded to in any adequate way. There was insufficient justice or accountability. People were not listening to the survivors and victims. The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, gave us a particular case, that of Ryan Evans, who paid the ultimate price in Ukraine for shining a light on the atrocities there.

I mentioned in my opening remarks that I heard Kate Adie earlier today at the unveiling of the statue of “Tank Man”, where she said that the protesters in the square in Tiananmen said to her, “Please go and tell the world”. That is what so many of our brave journalists have done down the years. They have gone and told the world, at great risk to their own lives. We surely have to underline, as my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, told us, that atrocities flourish in darkness, and we have to shine a light on those things.

The noble Lord, Lord Hussain, said that early warning is useless without early action. The noble Lord, Lord Rook, said that the true test is in implementation. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said that we needed something like the Elie Wiesel Act in our own country. This is the beginning of a conversation. We can continue it, I think, on 17 July, on my Private Member’s Bill. But it is also a conversation to have within your Lordships’ House, perhaps with the special envoy David Smith, the Member of Parliament who has been referred to, with whom I travelled once to India. I have a very high regard for him, but it would be good too to have officials from the FCDO present at a meeting with those who have taken part in this debate, where we can discuss more candidly, and perhaps with one another, some of the issues that I know unite us.

I will end by saying that I was particularly pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Collins, was given the task of replying to today’s debate. We have missed his voice often in this House on these issues. No one cares more deeply about them than he does. I am grateful to him and to all the Members of your Lordships’ House who have taken part in today’s debate.