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Foreign Affairs and Defence

I welcome the fact that we have this annual debate, although it is a shame that this one coincides with a sitting of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. That does not seem terribly clever planning of parliamentary business, but of course it has never happened before. Today is United Nations human rights day, and the theme of our debate ought surely to be the importance of international treaties, international agreements and international law to the way we operate. Some important reviews of a number of international treaties are coming up. There is also the serious problem of the denial of human rights around the world, both in the individual sense of the many people who suffer imprisonment, torture and isolation, or who are forced to flee into asylum and exile, as well as in relation to the 1 billion people—one in six of the world's population, according to UN figures—who face starvation because of a lack of food for them to eat. This is not about a lack of food supply around the world; it is about people's lack of ability to buy enough food to survive. That is surely a basic human right in itself. I want to make a number of points on international law. I should like to know what stance the Government plan to take when the International Criminal Court review comes up in 2010. There are clearly limits to the Court's effectiveness so long as a number of member states, including the United States, have not signed up to it, and to the Court's ability to get people who have been arraigned on charges of genocide and torture to appear before it. I hope that we will reiterate our support for the principles behind the International Criminal Court, as well as using the good offices of the incoming President Obama in the hope that he will change the United States approach to the UN and its agencies and to international law in general, as well as signing up to that particular process. It is also important that we ourselves abide by international law and conventions, and this relates to the behaviour of the British Government towards, for example, the Chagos islanders in the Indian ocean, who were quite wrongly thrown off those islands in the 1970s and 1980s. They have fought a long and stoic legal campaign for the right to return but, unfortunately, the House of Lords finally rejected, by a majority verdict, their application to set aside the Orders in Council of 2004. The Chagos islanders might well exercise their right to take their case to international jurisdiction, and, personally, I hope that they do.