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Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill [HL]

My Lords, our attitude on these Benches to this Bill can be described succinctly: it is to give the Bill a warm welcome. We are glad to see it come forward and happy to help it on to the statute book. I congratulate the Minister on her comprehensive presentation. The unanimity between all the parties in agreeing on the virtues of the Bill is notable. I have to tell the Minister that it may not always be quite like this on other legislation. However, the Bill has substantial support from all sides. I join in saluting my noble friend Lord Elton and the noble Lords, Lord Dubs and Lord Ramsbotham—and the late Lord Garden—for their expert support work. They speak with great experience when explaining how these weapons are not only hideous but useless. Of course, my noble friends and I and other noble Lords on other Benches will need reassurance on certain points, and noble Lords will, no doubt, make some suggestions in Committee for improving and strengthening the Bill, which I hope the Government will accept. However, there is no question about the Bill’s main purpose and aim, and we support it. One must, of course, be realistic as well as properly idealistic. Noble Lords, Ministers and many others, including organisations outside this House, have worked very hard over a long period to see this legislation emerge. However, we have to face it that, as in other fields of government, merely passing a law does not necessarily make it so, or certainly not immediately. The wish has to be progressed into thoughts and action. In a number of senses, there is still quite a long way to go. First, we have to recognise that we are dealing with a very complex pattern of products and situations. There are no fewer than 210 different types of cluster munitions produced by 34 countries and distributed to many others round the world. The largest producers, as noble Lords have reminded us in their excellent and expert contributions, have not signed the convention—that is, China, Russia and the USA. Nor has Pakistan and nor has Israel, which used these weapons in such profusion in south Lebanon a couple of years ago. Nor, of course, have the rogue states, the usual suspects: North Korea, Iran, Myanmar and so on. Worse still, these ugly munitions may well now be in the hands of non-state groups like Hezbollah, which may have even less scruples about using them when the pressure is on. We must recognise that much persuasive effort is still required. I greatly welcome the report that the Minister gave us about what went on at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at Trinidad. That is just one more example of how the Commonwealth is emerging as a new additional and supportive platform in promoting soft power or—dare I even say it?—smart power, and carrying forward humanitarian and other peace-engendering moves around the planet. As for timing, the convention comes into force only when 30 countries have ratified it. So far 24 have done so, although several more have signed it, as we know. Even after the 30-state point for ratification, the Bill requires six more months before the convention's prohibitions come into force. A number of questions have been asked about actions on the ground, to which it would be interesting to hear the answers. We understand, and the Minister needs to confirm this clearly, that it will take until 2013 to destroy the UK’s own stockpiles, and that the aim is to see all stockpiles belonging to any country destroyed or removed within eight years. That embraces all the stockpiles held by foreign powers on our soil. To look, slightly negatively, at the things we have to overcome to carry all this forward, there is the problem that the Minister herself raised in a Statement yesterday, as did Mr Bryant in another place, about the indirect financing of manufacturing activities that may produce these horrific weapons. The direct financing is dealt with in the Bill, but the indirect financing needs more attention, as the Minister has explained. In short, this is not a rapid-result process. We are not going to see instant solutions. Nor should there be such solutions, probably; there is a lot of detailed work to be done. In the Bill there are a range of practical defences and clauses allowing for flexibility in the way that the rundown is handled. The destruction of these weapons is covered by the necessary transfer experimentation, research and so on. Clause 7 sets out some of these in detail. In many areas of the world—I am thinking of Lebanon, Laos, Iraq, Nagorno-Karabakh and Sri Lanka, most of which I have had the opportunity to visit—this prohibition comes much too late anyway for the children who are dead, the families that are destroyed and those whose limbs have been blown off. We need to examine with especial care what this ban does to the situations in which our Armed Forces may find themselves, and we need to be sure that in prohibiting killer cluster bombs and their use in the ways that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has so expertly described, we do not also limit the technical means to take out systems rather than people. I do not think that this has been mentioned in the debate. I have in mind here such weapon types as the CBU-94/B so-called soft bombs, which do not blow up and damage people but scatter fibres to short-circuit electricity systems. These devices were used to great effect, as the Minister will no doubt recall, in taking out Belgrade’s electricity grid in the Bosnian war. That certainly helped to bring that ugly conflict to an end, simply because the Serbian Government realised that they could not go on. It could be argued that the sort of technology that disables utilities and knocks out the remains of normal life in a rogue country or society is much better than bombing civilian fixtures flat or scattering explosive antipersonnel weapons that kill large numbers of civilians in the process and, as we have heard graphically, continue to kill them for years afterwards. As to the position of our Armed Forces, the Bill recognises that they could find themselves operating with other military contingents from countries which have not applied the prohibition. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury and many others raised this point. These matters are addressed in Clauses 8 and 9 under the headings of "Visiting forces" and "International military operations and activities". The buzzword here seems to be "interoperability", or, to put it in plain, non-military jargon, what happens when our forces, without cluster weapons—rightly—find themselves in joint operations alongside forces which want to use them or do use them. Optimists may say that this is not very likely to happen, but in the world of globalised security operations that may turn out to be quite wrong. I heard one senior defence official claim recently that the Afghans, for instance, would never put up with foreign troops on their soil. But in the future, everyone may have to get used to the mixing of armed forces of different nations, not only in visiting each other and training together but even, possibly, being based together. That is the pattern of global security and global peacekeeping in the future. That is what they may come to mean. Anyway, here in Europe we have had foreign troops on home soil for nigh on 65 years—the Americans here and our own British forces in Germany. These have on the whole been welcome arrangements and have led to all kinds of joint operations. Even the Japanese know all about foreign troops on sovereign territory, with only one or two points of friction. The point I am getting at is that these mixtures of forces in the general cause of peacekeeping and global stability will become more and more frequent—in fact, they will become the norm. If every nation had signed up to the convention and ratified its requirements, there would be no problem, but in real life—in the practical and most likely future—armed forces from nations which are party to the convention and those which are not yet so will be more and more likely to work together and train on each other’s soil. This raises some very important issues which the Bill addresses, although there are complications and questions that need clarification. This is what is happening already, and we must not allow the practical problems of this kind of interoperability to undermine or mess up the convention’s high and noble purposes. It can be safely predicted that in the international intervention patterns of the future, our Armed Forces will almost always be operating jointly with others. It is usually the Americans nowadays, but maybe in the future, as the landscape changes, it will be the Indians, the Japanese, the Ukrainians, Gulf forces, Polish forces or the Egyptians. Who knows? We have already seen this kind of joint effort in existing war theatres and there will be much more of it. These operations will have to be swift and flexible, and able to adapt to the terrifying asymmetry of modern warfare, which empowers the smallest groups with the most fearsome weapon. It would be miserable if they became tangled up in interminable arguments about interpreting the convention. The best must not become the enemy of the good. What I am saying is not in any way an argument against this fine Bill or its purposes; instead, it is in favour of making the provisions in these complicated future circumstances as simple and workable as possible. I hope that that can be done. I hope that my points have illustrated to the Minister some of our concerns on the issues on which we need reassurance, while generally wishing the Bill to go forward fast. We have one or two other reservations and queries such as the granting of yet more power to the long list of officials allowed to enter people’s homes. I know that it is necessary—it is always said to be necessary—but we need to be careful when we as legislators add to such powers on the statute book. Those are points of detail that we can address in Committee. We also all want to know how, in the light of what the convention requires, we can give maximum help to those sad bomb victims, of whom there are so many thousand around the world. In general, we like what we see. We want it to work and we share the Minister’s determination and enthusiasm that it shall. In an uncertain and unpredictable world, we can be proud for the contribution that we make in seeing that the legislation goes forward.