division_name: Backbench Business - Daesh: Genocide of Minoritiesbackbench Business
motion: <p pid="a957.2/2" pwmotiontext="yes">That this House believes that Christians, Yazidis, and other ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq and Syria are suffering genocide at the hands of Daesh; and calls on the Government to make an immediate referral to the UN Security Council with a view to conferring jurisdiction upon the International Criminal Court so that perpetrators can be brought to justice.</p>
  
  <p pid="a958.1/3" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Listen to me, help the girls, help those in captivity; I am pleading with you, let us come together and call this what it is: a genocide. This is about human dignity. You have a responsibility. ISIS are committing a genocide, because they are trying to wipe us out.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a958.1/5" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group&#8230;Killing&#8230;Causing serious bodily or mental harm&#8230; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions&#8230;calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part&#8230;Imposing measures intended to prevent births&#8230;Forcibly transferring children&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a959.0/4" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;we might as well rip up the genocide convention as a worthless piece of paper.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a959.0/6" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims. Daesh is genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology and by actions&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a959.0/9" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;it is a long-standing Government policy that any judgements on whether genocide has occurred should be a matter for the international judicial system rather than legislatures, governments or other non-judicial bodies.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a959.0/12" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;I remain profoundly concerned by this situation and I want to emphasise our collective duty as a global community to respond to the plight of victims whose rights and dignity have been violated. ISIS continues to spread terror on a massive scale in the territories it occupies. The international community pledged that appalling crimes that deeply shock the conscience of humanity must not go unpunished. As Prosecutor of the ICC, I stand ready to play my part, in an independent and impartial manner.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a959.0/19" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;to see justice done for my people.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a962.3/5" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;historical memory is a tool of prevention&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a965.4/3" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a968.0/2" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a972.2/6" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;There was a knock at our door. We were targeted because our religion and belief is different from theirs, and our humanity is different from theirs, because we believe in the Angel Taus. In our religion, we do not believe in rape. We do not believe that innocents should be killed, or that a child should be cut up and his mother forced to eat him. My father and my two brothers were killed in front of me. They took me away from my mother. He grabbed my arm and my leg and then he raped me. He was 32 years old; I was 15. After they raped me, they took my friend and they raped her. I could hear her shouting, &#8216;Where is the mercy? Where is the mercy? There must be some mercy in their hearts.&#8217; They killed the men and they took the girls. Any girls over the age of nine were raped&#8212;like me. What does a nine year understand about sex or rape? What did she do to deserve this? I saw this nine-year-old girl raped with my own eyes, by not one man but several. I saw her die&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a972.2/8" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;We saw a two-year-old boy killed, then ground in to meat and fed to his mother who did not know what she was eating.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a972.2/10" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Some young girls were impregnated, and were only children. What are they going to do as pregnant children? There is so much brainwashing. Daesh tell you your religion and brainwash children&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a972.2/12" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;put them in front of their own parents and demand that they kill them. Listen to me, I am begging you. Listen to me, listen to what I am telling. Help us. I beg of you. Listen to me. Help the girls who are still in captivity. Let us all stand hand-in-hand and take a stand. This is a genocide against Christians and Yazidis&#8221;&#8212;</p>
  
  <p pid="a972.2/14" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;This is about dignity, this is about humanity in dignity. If you are a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a human, do not close your ears. I plead with you, please listen.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a974.0/3" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a975.1/4" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;I too believe that acts of genocide have taken place&#8221;.&#8212;[Official Report, 12 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 165.]</p>
  
  <p pid="a978.1/3" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;the death of a single Muslim, no matter his role in society, is more grave&#8230;than the massacre of every kafir on earth.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a978.1/5" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Any disbeliever standing in the way of the Islamic State will be killed, without pity or remorse, until&#8230;governance is entirely for Allah.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a979.5/3" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;there is nothing to prevent Her Majesty&#8217;s Government from forming and acting upon its own view&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a979.5/5" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Words without experience are meaningless.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a980.0/6" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;The Sunnis must stand on one side. The Shi&#8217;a, Kurds and Yazidis must stand on the other. If I find out that a Shi&#8217;a is among the Sunnis, I am going to cut off his head with a sheet of metal.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a980.0/11" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;you&#8217;ll have water in paradise.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a980.0/13" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;raise his hand and say his number.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a980.0/16" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;systematic hunting of members of ethnic and religious groups&#8221;&#8212;</p>
  
  <p pid="a980.0/19" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;whether the violence currently being perpetrated against Christians and other minority religious groups (notably Yazidis and members of certain Islamic communities) by Daesh&#8230;in territory controlled by them in Syria and Iraq constitutes genocide within the meaning of the December 9 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, &#8216;the Genocide Convention&#8217;.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a980.0/21" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;If behaviour can be properly classified as genocide then a range of international law consequences ensue. The first of these consequences is the activation of the twofold undertaking by contracting parties contained in Article 1 of the Genocide Convention to prevent and to punish genocide. Article 1 reads as follows:</p>
  
  <p pid="a980.0/22" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8216;The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a980.0/24" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;it seems to me that actual or potential victims of genocide have a right to truthful acknowledgement of their circumstances and that governments are under a corresponding duty to make such acknowledgements...I have no hesitation in saying that the violence perpetrated against these protected groups does constitute genocide.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a982.0/8" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;We are not submitting any evidence of possible genocide against Yezidis and Christians to international courts, nor have we been asked to.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a982.0/11" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;we are helping to gather evidence that could be used to hold Daesh to account appropriately.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a982.0/14" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;We as the Government are not the prosecutor, the judge or the jury. Such matters are determined first in the international courts and in the United Nations Security Council&#8221;.&#8212;[Official Report, 12 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 165.]</p>
  
  <p pid="a982.0/17" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;there is nothing to prevent Her Majesty&#8217;s Government forming and acting upon its own view.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a982.0/19" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;reconsider its position and&#8230;clarify why it operates a policy of refusing to recognize acts of genocide, when so many other nations do not?&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a985.1/4" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Islamic State had one intention, to destroy the Yazidi identity by force, rape, recruitment of children and the destruction of holy sites they captured, especially against Yazidi women where they used rape as a means of destruction for Yazidi women and girls, ensuring these women will never return to a normal life. But it was not only me who suffered, it was a collective suffering. The Islamic State gave us two choices, convert or die. For those who accepted to convert, fearing for their lives, their men were killed, women were enslaved and children were recruited.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a985.1/6" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Open your borders for my community, we are victims of a genocide and we have the right to seek a safe place where our dignity will be preserved. We request that to give Yazidis and other threatened minorities the choice to resettle, especially the victims of human trafficking, as Germany did.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a986.0/2" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;to make an immediate referral to the UN Security Council with a view to conferring jurisdiction upon the International Criminal Court&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a987.0/3" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a987.0/5" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;(a) Killing members of the group;</p>
  
  <p pid="a987.0/6" pwmotiontext="yes">(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;</p>
  
  <p pid="a987.0/7" pwmotiontext="yes">(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;</p>
  
  <p pid="a987.0/8" pwmotiontext="yes">(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;</p>
  
  <p pid="a987.0/9" pwmotiontext="yes">(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a987.0/14" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them&#8221;,</p>
  
  <p pid="a987.0/16" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;The gates of your land are wide open to your foes.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a988.0/3" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;That this House is extremely concerned about the genocidal campaign being waged against minorities in Iraq&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a988.0/5" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;and notes with alarm the evidence recently collected by Amnesty International about&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a988.0/7" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;brutal campaign to obliterate all trace of non-Arabs and non-Sunni Muslims that has turned the area into blood-soaked killing fields; is shocked by the barbaric treatment of Yazidi&#8221;&#8212;</p>
  
  <p pid="a988.0/11" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;are determined first in the international courts and in the United Nations Security Council, but we are helping to gather evidence that could be used to hold Daesh to account.&#8221;&#8212;[Official Report, 12 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 165WH.]</p>
  
  <p pid="a989.2/3" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;pass by on the other side.&#8221;&#8212;[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 March 2016; Vol. 769, c. 2157.]</p>
  
  <p pid="a989.2/6" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;There can be no doubt that genocide is being carried out on Yazidi and Christian communities&#8212;and the West/international community&#8217;s failure to recognise what is happening will be to our collective shame in years to come&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a990.1/7" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Christians have fled their villages. They are walking on foot in Iraq&#8217;s searing summer heat. They are facing catastrophe and a real genocide&#8221;.</p>
  
  <p pid="a990.1/11" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;We, the women and children, were taken by bus from the school&#8230;They humiliated us along the way and touched us in a shameful way. They took me to Mosul with more than 150 other Yazidi families. There were thousands of families in a building there, including children who were given away as gifts. One of the men came up to me. He wanted to take me. I looked down at the floor. I was absolutely terrified. When I looked up, I saw a huge man. He was like a monster. I cried out that I was too young&#8230;He kicked and beat me. A few minutes later, another man came up to me. I was still looking at the floor. I saw that he was a little smaller. I begged for him to take me. I was terribly afraid of the first man. The man who took me asked me to change my religion. I refused. One day, he came and asked me for my hand in what they called &#8216;marriage&#8217;. A few days later, this man forced me to get dressed and put on my makeup. Then, on that terrible night, he did it. He forced me to serve in his military company. He humiliated me daily. He forced me to wear clothes that barely covered my body&#8230;That night he beat me. He asked me to take my clothes off. He put me in a room with guards, who proceeded to commit their crime until I fainted.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a992.0/6" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Can you imagine these little ones in the hands of those criminals? Alina is barely three; she was abducted with her mother and her nine-month-old sister; and Rosalinda, five, was abducted with her mother and her three brothers aged eight to 12. We get news from some of them, but others are missing and we don&#8217;t know if they are alive or dead or what has happened to them.&#8221;</p>
  
  <p pid="a996.1/4" pwmotiontext="yes">&#8220;Not only are the courts best placed to judge criminal matters but their impartiality also ensures the protection of the UK Government from the politicisation and controversies that often attach themselves to the question of genocide.&#8221;</p>