Home > UK-China Relations: Report of International Relations and Defence Committee Report Cites IPS Written Evidence

UK-China Relations: Report of International Relations and Defence Committee Report Cites IPS Written Evidence

Sep 20, 2021

On 20 September, the International Relations and Defence Committee of the House of Lords published its report, The UK and China’s security and trade relationship: A strategic void, following the Parliamentary Inquiry convened on the same topic earlier this year. Our Programme on International Peace and Security (IPS) promptly responded to the Inquiry’s call of evidence in a written submission authored by IPS Executive Director Federica D’Alessandra, IPS Research Assistant Henry Wu, IPS Research Consultant Rhiannon Neilsen, and Visiting Fellow of Practice Kirsty Sutherland. In its report, which cited the IPS submission 11 times, the Committee urged the Government to publish a clear and consistent written strategy setting out its trade and security relationship with China, concluding that a coherent strategy is essential to show how the Government intends to balance its ambition for increased economic engagement with China with the need to protect the UK’s wider interests and values, including security issues, as well as the need to protect human rights. Inter alia, endorsing our team’s recommendation on the matter, the Committee concluded that ‘the Government should incorporate an atrocity prevention lens in its overall approach to trade. Current atrocity prevention tools and strategies have fallen short, so we ask that the Government outlines how it intends to strengthen these tools, including the effective use of sanctions and other consequences once an atrocity is determined to have occurred.”

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