The British government has been accused of failing to address the rising threat of political poisonings in the UK after an A-Level student presented a report to the House of Lords highlighting its inaction.
Labour peer Baroness Kennedy KC, who chaired the panel in the Palace of Westminster on Thursday, highlighted Sophia Browder’s “revelatory” research but added it was “embarrassing” for the government that a 17 year-old was having to point out its shortcomings.
She said: “Political criminal poisoning is becoming a favoured method of rogue regimes to deal with their opponents abroad.
“MI5 recently warned there are likely to be more such attacks and poisoning could become another key way of carrying out terror attacks, with less responsibility being attached to these regimes.”
Miss Browder added: “Governments need to play a more active role in preventing foreign powers from poisoning their opponents.”
Sophia Browder, the report’s author, was due to present the findings to policymakers in the U.K. at an event hosted by the Henry Jackson Society think tank on Tuesday.
“Unfortunately, it seems like the British government has been asleep at the wheel in terms of dealing with these political poisonings,” Browder said in a statement. She added that the U.K. government “has a duty to protect dissidents, journalists, and the public,” and that such poisoning incidents should be considered a “high priority issue.”
The report analyzed 77 cases over the past 90 years, in which there is enough information about poisonings, symptoms, poisons, etc. Sophia Browder, founder of Poisonreporting.org, emphasizes that only cases of poisoning of activists who can be considered political opponents of the regime (as opposed to from crimes of a criminal or domestic nature). Many such cases remain unknown, especially in authoritarian countries and dictatorships. For example, only two recorded cases in China indicate that there is simply no public information about this method of dealing with opponents….
The report says:
The rise in reported cases may be directly linked to poisonings carried out by Russia after Putin came to power in 1999, and began using poison, once a signature tool of the KGB, to suppress opponents.
Sophia Browder will present her findings on the use of poison as a common method of political transnational repression on Thursday in the House of Lords.