Countries in the free world have more leverage than people may think against the Chinese regime’s abusive behavior, the UK’s Sir Iain Duncan Smith said.
Speaking with The Epoch Times on March 4 about an amendment he supports that aims to stop bilateral trade with genocidal countries, the former Conservative Party leader said the Chinese regime has an “appalling” human rights record.
“What we’ve got now in China going on is what many of us believe the data shows is, frankly, likely to be genocide,” he said.
If the amendment is passed, an ad-hoc Parliamentary Judicial Committee—composed of retired judges in the House of Lords—can make preliminary determinations on whether a partner in a relevant bilateral trade agreement with the UK has committed genocide, so the government can decide its actions accordingly.
Duncan Smith said he thinks the UK government is trying to block the amendment because it wants to trade with the Chinese regime after the EU rushed through what he called a “terrible trade deal with China.”
“So I think the UK feels under pressure. Because having left the European Union, you know, we don’t want them to have advantage,” he said. “That’s the thinking of the government. But it’s the wrong thinking.”
With the international route to deal with genocide in China effectively blocked, Duncan Smith said that the UK “needs to lead,” and “have a real chance to lead” in taking actions to stop the regimes abusive behavior, thanks to its connections with the Commonwealth and alliances with the rest of the Five Eyes states, France, and some other European countries.
Duncan Smith said the Chinese authorities have been “pretty brutal” to its own people and its relationship towards other countries has been a “thoroughly bullying one,” and it has been able to get away with “an awful lot of its behavior” because of the free world’s dependency on it.
“The dependency on China has got to end,” he said. “We have more leverage in the free world than we think.”