Member

There is an element here of unfinished business, for not just me but other Members of your Lordships’ House. In 2015, a number of us repeatedly raised the danger of an unfolding genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq. I subsequently visited the region in 2019 and took first-hand accounts at Sinjar and elsewhere, some of which I shared with Government Ministers. The 2017 UN-backed study estimated that nearly 10,000 Yazidis were either killed or abducted, many experiencing murder, enslavement, torture and rape. Even though these crimes were committed outside our territory, the UK is able, under the International Criminal Court Act 2001, to exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction over the crime of genocide. Other international crimes, such as torture and grave breaches of the Geneva conventions, can also be prosecuted on the basis of universal jurisdiction. When the JCHR looked at this, and it was debated in your Lordships’ House back in September in a debate led by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, the committee was appalled to find that not one—I emphasise this—of the 400 British ISIS combatants who returned to the United Kingdom had been prosecuted for such atrocities as genocide.