Last week the House of Lords amended the Holocaust Memorial Bill to provide that the sole purpose of the Learning Centre to be built as part of the Holocaust Memorial must be “the provision of education about the Holocaust and antisemitism”.
I moved this amendment because I am concerned that the Learning Centre might stray from its core purpose and drift into other messages. This concern is neither hypothetical nor remote. We have already seen examples of Holocaust commemorations forgetting about the Jews or being used to platform unrelated messages. In some cases, those messages seem to have been designed to upset and provoke Jews. This trend predates the war in Gaza. In 2019, for example, Yvonne Ridley, who accused Israel of being on “the path of reviving the policies of Adolf Hitler”, was a speaker at an event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day organized at Newcastle College by University and College Union.
With this amendment, Parliament would send a clear signal that there is no room in the Learning Centre for any such nonsense.
The Holocaust Memorial Bill now heads to the House of Commons, which can accept, revise, or reject the Lords’ amendment. Despite Labour whipping its members in the Lords against it, the amendment passed with backing from Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green, Crossbench, and non-affiliated peers in a late-night vote. One Labour peer broke ranks to support it.
A lot of us were genuinely surprised at the Government’s decision to oppose this amendment, and we now hope the Commons will accept it. Is it really too much to ask that a Learning Centre established by Parliament to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust should focus only on the Holocaust and antisemitism?
Proposed design of Westminster Holocaust Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens
To be clear, the concern is not that any of the individuals currently involved in the Project would do otherwise. But we legislate for the future. Those currently in charge will at some point be replaced. Unfortunately, the Bill’s Explanatory Notes already suggest that the Learning Centre will also explore how Britain’s Parliament responded to persecutions that took place “subsequently” and how the lessons of the Holocaust apply to “other genocides.” In the debate on the Bill on the House of Lords, the Minister said that such “other genocides” may include Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.
Of course, I have no objection to people being educated about atrocities that happened before or after the Holocaust. As part of my first job in academia, as a researcher at what was then Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Programme, I interviewed dozens of Rwandans in East Africa in the aftermath of the genocide: survivors, by-standers and – alas – even some perpetrators, although, thankfully, under Rwandan and American pressure, the worst perpetrators who had been at large in Nairobi were arrested by the Kenyans in July 1997 and dispatched to the Special Tribunal for Rwanda, where they were prosecuted and convicted.
It was harrowing work—and intellectually humbling. The complexity of Rwandan history and society kept defying my understanding. This is not a story that can be fairly told as an appendage of the Holocaust.
In April 2024, I was invited by the Rwandan Government to attend the 30th commemoration of the genocide of the Tutsis. South Africa had already brought its case on genocide against Israel, but even though the South African President was in attendance, no one suggested drawing a comparison between Rwanda in 1994 and Gaza. To put things into perspective, given the speed and scale of the killings during the Rwandan genocide, the entire population of Gaza would have been wiped out within just seven or eight months if a similar rate of killing had occurred.
During that commemoration the only thing that was talked about was Rwanda’s tragic experience in 1994. This was Rwanda’s moment – and no one else’s. The same should be true for a Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre.
The amendment does not limit the ambition of the Learning Centre. In fact, it entrusts the Centre with two very difficult missions: to teach about the Holocaust and antisemitism.
But if the mission of the Learning Centre is reduced to moral platitudes, it will have served no meaningful purpose. Worse still, should the Learning Centre one day become a platform for advancing those platitudes in the context of contemporary events that some view as “persecution” or “genocide”, it risks promoting ignorance, prejudice and propaganda rather than enlightenment.
This risk cannot be underestimated at a time when the word “genocide” is invoked more frequently than ever before. At the International Court of Justice alone, disputes involving allegation of genocide are proliferating: Ukraine vs. Russia, South Africa vs. Israel, Gambia vs. Myanmar, Sudan vs. UAE. Parliament has not been immune to this trend either: half of the 5,419 mentions of ‘genocide’ in Hansard since 1948 have occurred in the past five years.
The amendment does contemplate a wider lesson, beyond the Holocaust, on which the Learning Centre should seek to educate visitors. It is the most obvious lesson that should accompany Holocaust education: antisemitism.
This lesson has never been more urgent, given the rise in antisemitism in recent years. In the UK, 33% of all recorded religious hate crimes in the year ending March 2024 were directed at Jews – a community that represents just 0.3% of the population. Globally, the figures are worse. The Anti-Defamation League’s latest Global 100 Survey reports that 46% of the world’s adult population – 2.2 billion people – harbour entrenched antisemitic attitudes. That is the highest level since the ADL began tracking these trends.
Against that backdrop, it is even clearer that the Learning Centre must be exacting and unapologetic in its purpose.
Lord Verdirame KC specialises in public international law, international arbitration (especially investment treaty arbitration and inter-state arbitration), human rights and constitutional law.
