Speaking yesterday, 25th November 2021, at a Red Wednesday event held in Prague, Lord Alton said that his first interest in freedom of religion or belief came through travel in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe when he campaigned for Christian and Jewish victims of religious persecution: “Meeting or campaigning for people like the Siberian Seven, Alexander Ogorodnikov, Vladimir and Marsha Slepak, Valeri Barinov, Fr.George Calciu and many others was deeply inspiring but it also reminded me how important it is that we who enjoy freedom of speech must use our voices on behalf of those who have none of the rights which we enjoy and too often take for granted.“
He said that the Houses of Parliament wil be lit red tonight to commemorate all those who suffer for their beliefs.
He told the Conference:
Red Wednesday is a day when we think about the millions around the world who are persecuted because of their religion or belief. Today, spare a thought for the Uyghur Muslims incarcerated in China, for the ancient Christian churches and Yazidis still facing genocide in the Middle East, for the non-believers persecuted for their atheism and the 250 million Christians persecuted worldwide.
The lodestar, or navigation point, for my remarks today is Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights –promulgated in 1948 with the Genocide Convention in response to the defining horrors of the Holocaust.
Article 18 insists that:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
The declaration’s stated objective was to realise,
“a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations”.
Eleanor Roosevelt, the formidable chairman of the drafting committee, argued that freedom of religion was one of the four essential freedoms of mankind.
In her words:
“Religious freedom cannot just mean Protestant freedom; it must be freedom of all religious people”, and she rejoiced in having friends from all faiths and all races.
Article 18 emerged from the infamies of the 20th century—from the Armenian genocide to the defining depredations of Stalin’s gulags and Hitler’s concentration camps; from the pestilential nature of persecution, demonisation, scapegoating and hateful prejudice; and, notwithstanding violence associated with religion, it emerged from ideology, nation and race. It was the bloodiest century in human history with the loss of 100 million lives.
The four great murderers of the 20th century—Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot—were united by their hatred of religious faith.
Yet, how quickly we forget.
Which is why, several years ago I suggested that we create a day to mark atrocities committed against those who refuse to renounce their faith or beliefs, who suffer as a consequence of Article 18 violations or through atrocity crimes. So often ignored discrimination and hatred of difference can morph into persecution and then into crimes against humanity and even Genocide. Article 18 is like a canary in the mine warning of poisonous danger.
To illustrate that this is contemporary and real I want to examine examples of what happens when we fail to take our Article 18 duties seriously.
This all began when we ignored the persecution of the Armenians and the Genocide which followed.
I would recommend Franz Werfel’s novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, published in 1933, based on a true story about the Armenian genocide. His books were burnt by the Nazis, no doubt to try to erase humanity’s memory, Hitler having famously asked, “Who now remembers the Armenians?”
The Armenian deportations and genocide claimed the lives of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian Christians. Werfel tells the story of several thousand Christians who took refuge on the mountain of Musa Dagh. The intervention of the French navy led to their dramatic rescue.
In 2019 I visited Northern Iraq and saw the commutation of a Genocide which set out to eradicate the Region’s Christians. I met Yazidis who had been besieged on Mount Sinjar. Many were murdered or enslaved. What happened to them and to the Christians of Syria and Iraq illustrates how that slow burn genocide initiated by the Ottoman Turks – and which has its Genesis in persecution and discrimination and in the violation of Article 18 -continues to this day.
In 1914, Christians made up a quarter of that region’s population. Now they are less than 5%. Archbishop Bashar Warda of Irbil, during a meeting that I chaired in the British Parliament, underlined their traumatic, degrading and inhuman treatment, pleading with the international community to provide protection.
Our obligations are set out in the preamble to the sixth recital of the 1998 Rome statute of the International Criminal Court, which recalls that, “it is the duty of every State to exercise its criminal jurisdiction over those responsible for international crimes”, while the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that the obligation each state thus has to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide is not territorially limited by the convention.
Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as follows:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”
The Convention and even the word Genocide came fro the campaigning of the Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin – more than 40 of whose family were slaughtered in the Genocide of European Jews – and who said that “international co-operation” was needed, “to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge”.
When countries added their signature to the Convention it laid them the moral and legal duty to, “undertake to prevent and to punish”, genocide—surely the crime above all crimes.
Yet all the minorities in the Middle East, whose very existence is under direct and immediate threat, have received from western governments is a woolly undertaking that they will collect evidence.
A former Yazidi MP told me that she could not understand why the West had not declared these events a genocide and why we had remained silent.
In a leading article the Timesnewspaper said the destruction of Christians from the Middle East “now amounts to nothing less than genocide…That crime, most hideously demonstrated by the Nazis, now enjoins others to take active steps to protect the victims.”
Writing in The Daily Telegraph. Boris Johnson then the Foreign Secretary said “Isis are engaged in what can only be called genocide …..though for some baffling reason the Foreign Office still hesitates to use the term genocide.”
Since 1948 we have witnessed genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burma, Bosnia, Darfur, and Northern Iraq and now in Tigray and in China’s Xinjiang-and this is not an exhaustive list. Yet still Governments refuse to name things for what they are.
The reason isn’t “baffling” it’s because they want to avoid the obligations which flow from such a recognition.
I have been to Western China and Tibet and have regularly raised the CCP’s atrocities.
These include its now discredited one child policy, which was based on forced sterilisations and forced abortions, the destruction of churches, the imprisonment of pastors, such as Wang Yi – incarcerated bishops, lawyers, dissenters, journalists – such as the young woman Zhang Zhan tortured and jailed for 4 years for shining a light into the origins of the Covid pandemic in Wuhan. On Friday last, concerned for her deteriorating health, the UN called for her release.
The Independent Tribunal of Sir Geoffrey Nice QC which found “incontrovertible evidence” of forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong and other minorities.
I hope that everyone on this call or taking part in this conference will write letters of protest to the Chnese Ambassador in their jurisdiction calling for Zhang Zhan’s release. And we need to wake up to the realities of life in Communist China.
Since the enormities of the Cultural Revolution – and the deaths of 50 million Chinese people – and the massacre in Tiananmen Square, we have seen outrages in Tibet and Hong Kong and the intimidation of Taiwan
As for the Uyghurs, the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken says “The forcing of men, women and children into concentration camps, trying to, in effect, re-educate them to be adherents to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, all of that speaks to an effort to commit genocide.’”
Liz Truss, the current U.K. Foreign Secretary has said that what is happening to Xinjian’s Uyghurs is a Genocide. The British House of Commons has said the same.
So now we have the unprecedented situation where the British Foreign Office is saying the opposite of what the Foreign Secretary is saying.
So there we have it. While people suffer grievously civilised democratic countries refuse to act – to uphold both Article 18 and the Genocide Convention. On this Red Wednesday we must insist that this changes and that we take our duties seriously- remembering the consequences which flow from remaining silent.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office joined in support lighting up in Red. The Minister, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon tweeted “we lit up the @FCDOGovuk UK Estate in red to stand in solidarity with persecuted Christians across the world. The UK will continue to be a fierce champion for promoting freedom of religion or belief for everyone, everywhere.”
