Lloyd Hatton

I agree with the right hon. Member’s remarks. I think that the actions of the previous Government and this Government to tackle the shadow fleet are starting to bite. The measures are hitting the Kremlin war machine and will slash the revenues that Putin desperately relies upon to continue to wage war in Ukraine. Secondly, I welcome sanctions against organised criminal gangs that are currently perpetrating the vile trade of people-smuggling. This action by the Government is a world first, and it targets ringleaders, key intermediaries and the suppliers of people-smuggling equipment. The sanctions help to disrupt the flow of money and materials, including by freezing property, bank accounts and other assets. It will help to disrupt a range of different activities—from supplying small boats for smuggling to sourcing fake passports, middlemen facilitating illicit payments, and people-smuggling via lorries and small boats. It also sanctions the very gang leaders themselves. The people-smuggling gangs operating on the English channel are attempting to make a small fortune. It is essential that this Government continue to use sanctions and every lever at our disposal to disrupt and destroy the gangs. Thirdly, the Government have made innovative use of sanctions against kleptocrats and their enablers. Notably, the Magnitsky-style sanctions deployed against Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president, for corruption and stealing public funds marked a pivotal moment in the fight against kleptocracy in Angola and helped to address long-standing corruption that had hindered development and worsened inequalities in the country. I welcome that action, as I am sure do Members on both sides of the House, but we must now look to deploy similar sanctions against other kleptocrats and those who enable their corrupt dealings. While all those measures are achievements worth celebrating today, I fear that we are not going quite far or fast enough. Our use of Magnitsky-style sanctions to target human rights abuses has, to date, been a little too timid. Only 229 individuals and entities have been sanctioned under that style of sanction, which contrasts with the nearly 3,000 individuals and entities sanctioned under a single scheme specific to one country: namely, Russia. As REDRESS and other civil society organisations have shown, too many individuals remain unsanctioned despite overwhelming evidence of their involvement in corruption and serious human rights abuses the world over. Despite high-profile designations, such as the targeting of Isabel dos Santos, the frankly limited number of Magnitsky-style sanctions imposed undermines their effectiveness. By focusing only on isolated bad actors, such narrow designations overlook key backers or enablers and they fail to adapt when entities rebrand, or disappear and then reappear, simply to sidestep sanctions. To illustrate the problem, here are just three brief examples that highlight the gap in our use of Magnitsky sanctions, allowing those responsible for egregious human rights violations to act with impunity. For instance, just last month the UK placed sanctions on four senior commanders of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces—the RSF—suspected of involvement in heinous violence against civilians in the city of El Fasher. The civil war in Sudan, as has already been mentioned, is the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, displacing some 13 million people. There is overwhelming evidence of heinous crimes, mass executions, starvation and the systemic and calculated use of rape as a weapon of war. Evidence compiled by the UN, experts and journalists has shown, as has already been cited, that the UAE and its officials have been secretly supplying weapons to the RSF via neighbouring Chad—a position that the Gulf state denies, but the overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise. Sadly, no action was taken against the RSF’s key military and diplomatic backer, the UAE, or against the chief commander of the RSF. Similarly, the narrow scope of sanctions designations in Georgia also undermines our response to the human rights crisis currently under way. Georgia is increasingly finding itself subject to authoritarian rule. Since the highly disputed election in 2024, during which the Georgian Dream party claimed victory, there has been an escalation in the crackdown on protests and on independent media, including widespread violence and human rights abuses. The Georgian Dream party has now captured almost all Government branches and institutions. It has used its new-found power to aggressively suppress protests and all scrutiny of its actions, including hundreds of reports of arbitrary detention and even torture. Although the UK has rightly sanctioned some of those responsible for violent attacks against journalists and protesters, key members of the pro-Russia elite were sadly absent from those designations. They include Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder and chairman of the Georgian Dream party, who was sanctioned by the Biden Administration in the United States for undermining democratic processes simply for the benefit of the Kremlin. The UK has yet to take the same steps in relation to Georgia, so will the Minister make decisive use of sanctions to crack down on the abuses, which only benefit the Russian Government and are entirely at the expense of the Georgian people? Finally, although the UK imposed sanctions on four individuals and one entity involved in the deadly repression of Uyghur Muslims in China in 2021, it never acted on detailed evidence received from REDRESS and other human rights organisations, which identified the broader command structure behind the violent atrocities committed against the Uyghur people in China. We cannot continue to ignore the calls, already put forward today, for sanctions on senior Chinese officials, who must include the Chinese Communist party secretary in Xinjiang, who is considered the architect behind the human rights abuses committed. Those three cases all show how limiting our use of Magnitsky-style sanctions undermines their effectiveness. Sanctions are a key tool in our armoury to crack down on the most egregious human rights abuses, but narrow designation overlooks the key backers or enablers of the worst atrocities. Underpinning our sanctions with strong enforcement is also critical to their impact. We know that sanctions are only as strong as the enforcement behind them. In last year’s cross-Government review of sanctions, the Government rightly recognised that there are gaps in the UK’s sanctions implementation and enforcement, which they are seeking to address through new measures to increase the deterrent effect of sanctions and enhance our ability to take robust action against those who choose to break the rules.