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Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I give this Bill a very warm welcome. It is not often that we have a debate on a Bill for which there is as much positive feeling and enthusiasm as there is today. I am delighted that the Minister is, with her first Bill, doing something so important and so widely welcomed. Even if she stays a Minister for many years, as I hope she will, I doubt if she will have a day when she will make such an important contribution to humanity as she will with this Bill. I am also grateful to her for the reassurances that she has given us about some aspects of the issue which are not necessarily contained in the Bill itself; nor need they be. As other noble Lords have said, the Bill will make an enormous difference to many people in the future, who will not lose their limbs or their lives. We have to remember, as the Minister said, how many millions of these awful weapons are still lying about, ready to trap and maim innocent civilians, long after the conflict in which they were used is over. It is important that the Bill becomes law before the general election, partly because it will send a strong signal to other countries, and partly because, frankly, if a Bill such as this cannot get through, we will all be failing. I hope the Government’s commitment is absolutely firm and that the Bill will sail through this House and the Commons and become law very quickly. My involvement with this issue stems back many years to the campaign against anti-personnel landmines when I was at the Refugee Council. I learnt then at first hand what weapons of this sort can do and the harm that they can cause. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Elton. He and I have worked together on this, and many other Members of this House have been helpful and supportive. The late Lord Garden was a stalwart figure in the campaign and there were so many others that I cannot mention them all. I join in thanking Landmine Action, led then by Simon Conway, for the work that it did and the help that it gave us; and the Cluster Munition Coalition, of which Thomas Nash was a prominent member. I also remember the occasion when a number of us went to see not one Secretary of State but three. We got to talk to the Secretary of State for Defence, the Secretary of State for Overseas Development and the Foreign Secretary. We got them in one meeting and pushed them very hard on the issue. I also express my thanks to officials from the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, who have been consistently helpful in this. I met some of them only last week and had a very useful discussion with them as a preliminary to today’s debate. It would be wrong to leave out two other names. One is John Duncan, who was our ambassador in Geneva and took the lead for this country in the negotiations at the various meetings, including in Dublin. He was very open, explained what was going on and was generally very helpful. I also thank Norwegian People’s Aid which, although it is an NGO in another country, has been very much in the lead in this matter, has put a lot of effort into it and has been very supportive to many other NGOs the world over. In south Lebanon a few months after the 2006 conflict, I watched 20 or more United Nations teams—quite a few of them were British—clearing the remnants of cluster munitions from olive groves, farmland and villages. I saw them blow up one weapon. One could see the weapons—they were taped off at this point, so there was no danger of my stepping on them—lying in the soft earth, ready to explode if anybody, by some mischance, stepped on them. One of the key issues that we often discussed, including when I raised this matter in a Private Member’s Bill some time ago, was the failure rate. We had interesting technical discussions on how many of the bomblets coming from a cluster bomb did not explode when they hit the ground. The Government’s then view was that the failure rate was less than 1 per cent, but we had evidence that it could be as high as 10 per cent. If one tests these weapons on hard concrete, they will go off, but normally they fall on soft earth in olive groves and agricultural land, where their fall is slowed down by trees and other plants. That is why the failure rate is much higher than was originally suggested. I am glad that argument was dismissed a long time ago. I attended various meetings in Vienna, Dublin, and in Oslo when our Foreign Secretary signed the measure. When some of the key decisions were made in Dublin, it was very clear that the British Government’s view was considered to be important. Admittedly, the Government did not agree to sign up to the measure until partway through the discussions, and there were some tense moments when we wondered whether things would work out all right, but they did. Our negotiators got the message from London and the British Government agreed to sign. That had an influential effect on some of the wavering countries that were not certain what to do. When they saw that the British Government had signed up, they said, "If the Brits can do it, so can we". That had a knock-on effect on quite a few of the countries that were present in Dublin, although not on all of them. The situation was touch and go, but eventually it worked out well. I fully appreciate that there are difficulties. After all, we are members of NATO, and not all members, including the United States, have signed up. When the Dublin convention was agreed, and then signed up to in Oslo, it was understood that some compromises would have to be made as the price of getting a ban through. I appreciate that some countries have not yet signed up, but as with the Ottawa convention on anti-personnel landmines, the fact that so many countries signed up deterred others from using those weapons. Similarly, the fact that so many countries have signed up to the convention on cluster munitions means that at least some users—but not all—will be deterred from using them. Sadly, in the conflict in south Georgia some 18 months ago, they were used by both sides. Nevertheless, I believe that the fact that so many countries have signed up will have an important influence on the others. I very much hope that the Government will use their influence—I think that the Minister said this—to persuade other countries in the Commonwealth and outside to sign up. The United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel and one or two European countries have not signed up, but I believe that, in the main, the future is with us, and that they will realise that they should sign up. I welcome the fact that so many of our stocks—up to a third—have already been got rid of. Initially, I thought that it was simply a matter of blowing them up. However, I was assured by military experts that it is not as simple as that. They tell me that it is difficult to minimise pollution and other unfortunate consequences, and that therefore it is a painfully long task to dismantle these weapons. The fact that we have got rid of 13 million out of 38 million of these weapons is a tribute to the Government’s will to get on with that task. Good progress has been made, which I welcome. All I ask of the Minister is for the Government to keep us informed as progress is made in getting rid of more of our weapons and of other stockpiles on British soil, and in persuading other countries to do as we have done.