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Mrs. Winterton: I am delighted that--for once during our time in the House--the hon. Lady seems to be on the same side as me. That is quite unusual, and I absolutely agree with her remarks.
It was raised in another place that anyone who might have an abortion voluntarily in another country could then complain here that she was forced to have that abortion. I share that concern. However, there is no evidence that denying asylum to people whose claims are based on enforced abortion will be of any use in preventing false claims. The applicant must prove her claim, so she would have to show that she really did have the abortion against her will. People willing to lie to obtain asylum will simply
switch to another story. The solution to credibility problems is careful case-by-case adjudication, not wholesale denial.
Measures to prevent abuse of refugee programmes must distinguish between toughness and meanness. Britons must bear it in mind that the national attributes of which we are justly proud--liberty, decency and fairness--are not free goods. One of the costs that they impose is that we may not return people--even inconvenient people--to dangerous places for subjection to unspeakable acts.
In conclusion, I had hoped that my hon. Friend the Minister would accept this clarifying amendment, although I know that that will not happen. If she had accepted it, there would have been no ambiguity, and the House would have sent out a clear message that enforced abortion is rightly regarded as torture. But I hope that the House will, in due course, have an opportunity to express its opinion on what I believe to be one of the gravest human rights violations imaginable.
Mr. Alton:
The amendments fall into three separate categories. Amendments (d) and (e) deal with torture, amendment (f) deals with the designated list, and amendment (b), which was ably spoken to by the hon. Member for Congleton (Mrs. Winterton), deals with a specific kind of torture that can be inflicted on a citizen.
In many countries--the hon. Member for Blackburn mentioned India--regional variations must be taken into account. What may be the wish of a Government nationally may not be what happens on the ground in some states and provinces, and a designated list cannot take that into account. That is why I will recommend that my right hon. and hon. Friends support the amendments as they apply to the designated list.
On torture, the hon. Member for Blackburn was good enough to mention the all-party amendment that I tabled on Report. I should like to pay tribute here to the Minister of State and her colleagues in another place for going some way to answer some of my points. I recognise that some movement has been made, and I am grateful. The Minister will know that, in another place, the Duke of Norfolk argued succinctly and eloquently about the need to put the word "torture" in the Bill. In a way, that has been attempted between the Bill's consideration in the House of Lords and its return to the Commons.
Amendment (b) aims to clarify what we mean by torture. One area in which there is insufficient clarification is the violation of women's rights. My hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Miss Nicholson) mentioned the mutilation of women as an example, and the hon. Member for Congleton stated what can happen to Chinese women who have more than one child.
I thought it mildly ironic that, last year, some 35,000 women gathered in Beijing to talk about women's rights. In what seemed to me to be almost the ultimate act of political correctness, motions were passed on everything under the sun, including guaranteeing sexual satisfaction to women the world over. Quite who will police these arrangements and what the penalties will be if satisfaction is not achieved I know not, but the women at the conference did not seem to notice the absence of the Chinese women who, day in, day out, have their human rights violated.
The one-child policy makes China the only country in the world where it is illegal to have a brother or a sister. The implications for next year, not for some faraway country of which we know little, but for the women of Hong Kong, should be glaringly obvious to hon. Members. A friend of mine from Hong Kong told me recently that he thought it unsurprising that many of the women in families of his acquaintance were currently pregnant; they are seeking to avoid the draconian laws that will apply when Hong Kong reverts to Chinese rule.
We cannot claim to have no interest in this issue. Last year, the Government gave £8.5 million to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, UNFPA, and £7.5 million to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, IPPF. That money was in turn channelled through the Chinese Population Association. A total of £100 million of British taxpayers' money in the past decade alone has aided, abetted and underwritten forced abortion, forcible sterilisation and the forcible fitting of IUDs, and it has been going on for more than 20 years.
There is not just sterilisation and abortion, but infanticide. Since the passing of legislation in China last year, handicapped and disabled babies have been left out to die, merely because of their disabilities, with the force of Chinese law. Surely that will be seen by historians as one of the most shameful episodes of human rights violation and abuse since the eugenics and genocide of the 1930s and 1940s.
Some hon. Members will have seen the film "The Dying Rooms" broadcast on Channel 4 in June 1995. Early this year, a return to the dying rooms was broadcast. Those broadcasts have had a profound effect on many people who simply did not believe that such things were going on in China, and I pay tribute to the brave journalists who made them. On 31 July, Anita Roddick, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Juliet Stevenson are launching a campaign called, "The Dying Rooms--Time for Action", which in their words will
The UNFPA is a United Nations agency. The United Nations purports to guarantee the
In 1995, reports from Feng Jia Zhuang and Long Tian Gou--two Catholic areas of China--reveal a combination of religious repression and political coercion. The slogan promoted by the state governments in those two regions is:
Far from condemning such practices, the executive director of the UNFPA, Nafis Sadik, said:
In a report entitled "Women in China: Imprisoned and abused for dissent", Amnesty International, the views of which would be different from mine on the broad sweep of pro-life questions, said:
"outline the circumstances of hundreds of thousands of baby girls who are left to die in China each year".
At the height of the mass sterilisation campaign in the 1970s, the UNFPA gave China the first ever United Nations population award for its success in curbing population. The UNFPA provided training for central Government officials responsible for the policy; it provided computer systems to monitor the effectiveness of the programmes in reaching their targets; and it funded the building of two factories that have made China self-sufficient in IUD production. Some 41 per cent. of Chinese women have IUDs inserted, often against their will. They can do little about it. X-ray machines are used to ensure that they do not have them removed.
"right to freely found a family and decide on the number and spacing of the children."
15 Jul 1996 : Column 814
In direct contradiction of that guarantee, the communist Chinese Minister for Family Planning, Mr. Qian Zinzhong has said:
The Chinese one-child policy marks it out, uniquely, as a country in which it is illegal to have a brother or sister, where little girls are eliminated in favour of their brothers and where eugenics laws like those favoured by the eugenicists who founded the IPPF now permit the killing of disabled children. The IPPF, with its historic links with eugenicists such as Huxley, Stopes, Sangster and Galton, should never be used as an instrument for utilising British funds.
"The size of the family is far too important to be left to the couple. Births are a matter for state planning."
"It is better to have more graves than one more child."
The local authorities repeatedly raid people's homes, confiscate families' property, round up the people and beat those who escape into nearby fields. Forced abortions have been performed on women in their last weeks of pregnancy, and women have been forcibly sterilised against their will. Monstrous fines--bigger than an annual income--are imposed on couples who do not comply. One villager had his legs so badly broken that he nearly died and, while concerned relatives inquired about him, they were arrested, abused and forced to pay a huge fine. Another villager unsuccessfully tried to sell his two children in an effort to have his wife freed from gaol.
"China has every reason to feel proud and pleased with its remarkable achievements in its family planning policy and control of its population growth over the past ten years. Now China could offer its experiences and special experts to other countries."
When I put that quotation to Baroness Chalker, she said that she did not believe that Sadik had ever said it. I pointed out that the quotation was taken from briefing material that had been provided by her Department.
"Amnesty International takes no position on the official birth control policy in China, but it is concerned about the human rights violations which result from it, many of which affect women in particular. It is concerned at reports that forced abortion and sterilisation have been carried out by or at the instigation of people acting in an official capacity, such as family planning officials, against women who are detained, restricted or forcibly taken from their homes to have the operations. Amnesty International considers that in these circumstances such actions amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees or restricted persons by Government officials."
The amendments give us a rare chance to focus on this major human rights question, which political correctness usually ensures does not dare speak its name. Ours is an advanced nation, but in the domestic and international arena we frequently promote policies that are uncivilised and inhumane. On the ground of choice, we sanction the daily killing of 600 unborn children in this country, we permit destructive experiments on human embryos and, on 1 August, we will cull thousands of human embryos, frozen and held in suspended animation having lost their
parents. An unborn child may be killed in Britain up to and even during birth because it is disabled, and the terminally ill or chronically infirm are killed by court order. Women in China are abused and their children are killed and we foot the bill. Advanced we may be, but civilised hardly.
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