A vote about China took a wild turn in the UK where MPs celebrated Australia’s tough stance only to turn the blowtorch on New Zealand.
Jacinda Ardern has been criticised for failing to take a tougher stance on China.
British parliamentarians made history on Thursday by following in the footsteps of the United States in declaring that China’s treatment of the Uighur ethnic minority amounts to war crimes and “genocide”.
MPs voted unanimously to pass the motion just weeks after the US made a similar declaration.
But the process took an unexpected turn when New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s name came up.
During a debate on the motion, moved by Conservative politician Nus Ghani, fellow Tory MP Bob Seely remarked that NZ had found itself in “one hell of an ethical mess” because of recent comments about China.
New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Specifically, Mr Seely was referring to New Zealand’s opposition to the use of the 70-year-old intelligence grouping known as the Five Eyes alliance – of which NZ is a party alongside the US, Canada, UK and Australia – to broadcast discontent about China.
Ms Ardern said she would prefer negative commentary about China from Five Eyes not be attributed to her despite New Zealand’s standing in the group. Her Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta went one step further.
“It’s not necessary all the time on every issue, to invoke Five Eyes as your first port of call in terms of creating a coalition of support around particular issues in the human rights space,” she said. Those comments were endorsed by the Chinese.
Mr Seely said New Zealand had failed to support its closest neighbour because it did not want to damage relations with Beijing.
The New Zealand Herald reports that he labelled Ms Ardern “a Prime Minister who virtue signals whilst crudely sucking up to China whilst backing out of the Five Eyes agreement”.
He said doing so was “an appallingly, appallingly shortsighted thing to be doing”.
“The Australians are calling out China and they’re doing it at trade risk – we need to make sure that they do not pay an ethical price.”
The Chinese flag behind razor wire at a housing compound in Yangisar in China's western Xinjiang region.New Zealand said on Monday it would not let the Five Eyes intelligence alliance dictate its dealings with its largest trading partner, in the latest distancing from the US-led group’s approach to tensions with Beijing.
The nation has previously been reluctant to sign joint statements from Five Eyes partners criticising China, including on the crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy movement and its treatment of Muslim Uighurs.
The comments come just months after Trade Minister Damien O’Connor urged Australia to show more “respect” to Beijing.
New Zealand officials have also been careful not to directly criticise China’s expanding influence in the Pacific, unlike their US and Australian counterparts.
In her speech, Mahuta raised the “major risk” posed by high levels of debt in the Pacific but stopped short of calling out China for what some critics have described as its “debt-trap diplomacy” in the region.
Her remarks further expose the growing divide on Beijing between New Zealand and partners like Australia.
New Zealand recently sealed an upgraded free trade agreement with China.
In contrast, Canberra’s robust criticism of Beijing on issues such as Hong Kong and the treatment of Uighurs has resulted in punitive levies on more than a dozen Australian imports, including wine and barley.
Chinese flags on a road leading to a facility believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, Xinjiang.
The UK’s vote on Thursday comes amid pressure for China to end its disgusting treatment of Uighurs, particularly the detention of some 1.5 million in a rapidly growing number of camps across Xinjiang.
A number of recent high-profile independent tribunals, investigations and reports have applied pressure on Western governments to act.
Most alarmingly, last month a nonpartisan panel of 50 global experts in human rights and law concluded without doubt that Beijing is engaged in “ongoing genocide” that aims to eliminate Uighurs.
Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington-based think tank, conducted the first non-government review of China’s alleged actions in Xinjiang and found overwhelming evidence that Beijing is violating all five provisions of the United Nations Convention on Genocide.
Those provisions are: killing members of a group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group; deliberately inflicting conditions of life aimed to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births; and forcibly transferring children out of a group.