Campaign Update: On the Record

Towards the end of 2015, London played host to two world leaders from countries with serious human rights concerns. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and Chinese President Xi Jinping touched down in London within weeks of each other, a perfect opportunity for CSW’s supporters to mobilise!

We asked you to email your MPs and tweet the UK Prime Minister David Cameron to ask him to go on the record about human rights with both Mr Modi and Mr Xi. Your response was fantastic: more than 300 people took action and over 230 MPs were lobbied.

While we didn’t get exactly the result we wanted – David Cameron didn’t raise human rights concerns with either Mr Modi or Mr Xi – we were still pleased to see parliamentarians raising human rights concerns publicly. Here’s some of what happened:

• Urgent question in parliament on China’s human rights record.
• Human rights concerns raised privately with President Xi Jinping by Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
• Letters from CSW published by the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Huffington Post.
• CSW was invited to meet the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Rt Hon John Bercow MP, with Bob Fu, President of our partner organisation China Aid.
• Jim Shannon MP held a written Q&A on India’s human rights record with Hugo Swire MP, Minister of State for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.