Tory rebellion aimed at stopping trade deals with genocidal regimes fails
A rebellion of Tory MPs who were trying to make it harder for the government to sign trade deals with genocidal regimes has fallen just short.
The amendment to the government’s trade bill – which would have made the government explain trade deals with potentially genocidal governments to parliament – lost by 318 to 300, saving Boris Johnson from an embarrassing defeat.
The amendment was drawn up by the House of Lords and supported by Tory MPs such as Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Nusrat Ghani.
The Lords amendment would have set up a new committee of parliamentarians who could force the government to explain why it has signed trade deals with countries the committee believes may have committed genocide.
The committee would have been made up of MPs and peers who have served in “high judicial office”.
The vote on the amendment came just days after foreign secretary Dominic Raab was caught on tape suggesting the UK could potentially sign deals with countries that have poor human rights records.
Trade minister Greg Hands said the amendment would give “a quasi-judicial role to an ad hoc parliamentary judicial committee to make preliminary determinations of genocide”.
“Giving this power to an ad hoc judicial committee would represent a fundamental constitutional reform, it would blur the distinction between courts and parliament and upset the separation of powers, so the government cannot support it,” he said.
It comes after the government today sanctioned senior Chinese officials over human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims in the country’s north.
Shadow trade secretary Emily Thornberry said before the vote that MPs should vote with “their consciences” when considering the amendment.
She also cited China’s human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims, which have been branded as genocide by the US.
“I know there are some people who believe the choices we makes as a country on who to sign trade deals with should be entirely dictated by our commercial interests and that considerations about human rights should be dealt with entirely separately,” she said.
“There is another point of view I think that is share by the majority of people in this country and a majority of MPs in this house which is simply this – there is a line there needs to be drawn, there are certain countries whose crimes are so great that they cannot simply be ignored on the basis of commercial self interest.”
A similar amendment was tabled by rebel Conservative MPs earlier this year and fell short by just 11 votes, after 33 Tory MPs and opposition parties voted for it.
Peers then put today’s amendment into the trade bill when it came back to them, which they believed the government could accept.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith said it was “a bit sad the government couldn’t accept this amendment” as it was “a major compromise”.
He said: “I spoke to a number of ministers and the reaction from each of them was ‘I don’t think there’s a problem here – you’ve met our red lines and this is a committee in the lords’.
“Suddenly late in the day they discovered this phenomenal red line called quasi-judicial. On the definition the government has given us today quasi-judicial can be apply to any select committee in the House of Commons.”