GREEN Party leader Natalie Bennett is speaking tonight at the Oxford Union in a debate titled ‘This House Would Sacrifice Trade With China in Protest of Human Rights Abuses’.
Her contribution will highlight the many human rights issues in China, and urge that the British government should pay more attention to these in its international pronouncements on China.
She will make this call in the context of a broader consideration of how British foreign policy should be developed.
Bennett is expected to use the occasion to draw attention to an urgent issue closer to home.
Bennett will say:
“There’s an immediate, pressing human rights situation occurring right now, today.
“It is in Turkey, a fellow Nato member, a fellow part of Europe.
“It starts with a simple story in the town of Cizre, in the province of Sizrak, on the 23rd of January, when 31 people took refuge in a basement of a house.
“They were taking refuge from their own government, their own army, for the town has been under curfew, a 24-hour curfew, since the 14th of December. Many of those people were wounded, and ambulances were called for them. None came. Two of them have since slowly, and almost certainly unnecessarily, died.
“The European Court of Human Rights has made two emergency rulings calling for the injured to be rescued – rescued not from a war, not from terrorists, but from their own government.
“Today I stand here and say, the British government must speak out, must call on Turkey to allow the people in that house in Cizre to be rescued.
"I call on Turkey to do that.
“These walls in the Union chamber have heard expounded many honest and admirable causes, causes of human rights and democracy, but seldom can it have heard such an honest and straightforward, such an urgent case, of humanitarian need – of the need for action to protect human rights, and particularly that most pressing human right of all, to life.”