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Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I should make it clear at the outset of these amendments that we on this side are strongly in favour of the Bill. We want to see its purposes carried forward and, indeed, to see it have a speedy passage first to the other place and then on to the statute book. At the same time, I hope that your Lordships will agree that no Bill is absolutely perfect and that we have a role and a duty to ensure that we know exactly what we are legislating for and, indeed, that we know the precise coverage and scope of the Bill so that we can offer our advice and recommendations to the other place and improve the legislation. That brings me straight to the Question of whether Clause 1 should stand part, because that is the clause which raises the issue of the weapons covered in the Bill. There is an easy answer, which I am sure will be avoided, and that is that what is covered in the Bill is what is defined in the Convention on Cluster Munitions. However, anyone who has studied the convention will see that it has a whole range of exclusions in Article 2, including weapons designed to dispense flares or smoke, have air defence capabilities and, according to the convention, electronic effects. I am not sure whether that means electronic self-destruct mechanisms or electronic impact on particular targets. The convention also excludes weapons with less than 10 explosive submunitions, which to the inexpert, such as myself, certainly seems rather high when we are trying to down cluster munitions as a class. Therefore, I ask the Minister whether the exclusions also include the German SMArt-155, the French BONUS munitions or the American SADARM munitions, which I think were used in Iraq—certainly around 2003 if not later. That is one question that seems to hang in the air. There is also the question of weapons not yet in service. Does the convention, or the Bill, if we carry it forward, cover larger weapons that are said to be coming along which have sensor-targeting and two failsafe systems? I have in mind here—I have taken this from the briefing—the 155 millimetre fused munition, BSFM, which is an artillery round. Indeed, are land-fired weapons of this kind covered at all? I think that the Israelis fired by artillery means a number of these cluster weapons in the 2006 Lebanon war. The convention seems to imply that we are talking only about air carriage and air-dropped weapons, but what can the Minister say about artillery-discharged clusters? There is then the broader point that the convention is rightly aimed at—indeed, its central purpose is—banning weapons which "cause unacceptable harm" to civilians. At Second Reading I raised the question of bomb clusters designed not to harm civilians and individuals but to knock out facilities, such as electricity transmission or mobile communications, which were used, so I am informed, in the Kosovo war in bringing Belgrade to a halt. The intention then was to disrupt our systems by producing short-circuits on high-voltage power lines and at sub-stations. There is obviously a balance to be made here. There is a need to consider whether these kinds of weapons, which are not intended to harm civilians and are targeted, are a good or a bad thing. Can we please have a few answers on these matters of definition and coverage of the Bill before we move on to further clauses?