Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 13th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 3 and have added my name to it. I have the advantage of having heard the last two contributions to this debate, which is, to some extent, a rehearsal of that which we held in Committee. I will take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, on one point—I have often known him to be hopeful but never naive.

I am tempted to adopt a speech that I made in Committee and sit down, but I will not do that because, like those who have spoken already, I do not understand the intransigence of this Government. I do not recall any noble Lord, other than the noble Baroness herself, making any speech in favour of the Government’s position either at Second Reading or in Committee. How much does it take? How much evidence is necessary to persuade this Government to change their mind?

Of course, we have heard the weight and the quality of the evidence of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, with his extensive experience. We heard, essentially, the forensic destruction of the government case, line by line, by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, in Committee, and we continue to hear the well-known and, one might think, well-informed opposition of Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank and General Sir Nick Parker. Some of these have been mentioned already, but no one has mentioned Elizabeth Wilmshurst —that most courageous opponent of the legality of military action against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, who resigned from her position in the Foreign Office—and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who has been both Secretary of State for Defence and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. How is it that, in the face of the mounting volume of evidence against them, the Government insist on holding to this position? I fail to understand.

In Committee, I quoted from the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. At that stage, its approach to this was to provide an executive summary, in the course of which it said that

“murder, torture and other grave war crimes face substantial legal barriers before there can be a prosecution … The Bill undermines our obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture”.

Again, I ask: what further evidence is required to persuade the Government that they are in the wrong place? Since then, the Bingham centre has produced a more detailed analysis of this proposed legislation. If your Lordships wish to see it reinforce what it has previously said, you will find that on page 16 of that analysis.

What do we know now? The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has made pretty clear a view that might result in a British citizen, a member of the British Armed Forces, possibly being taken to the International Criminal Court—can you imagine it? This country takes pride in our being advocates for the rules-based order in the face of other countries that simply want to ignore it or toss it aside.

I refer to the interests of the United Nations and the official responsible for human rights. Can you imagine the embarrassment of a prominent member of the Security Council asserting the rules-based order, in the teeth of Russian and Chinese unwillingness? I would love to know what the permanent representative of the British mission at the United Nations thinks about the position now being adopted.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. To plagiarise Lewis Carroll, laws mean what we want them to mean. That is certainly the position that was adopted when we came to Part 5 of the Internal Market Bill. What does this do for our standing and influence? How can we make those who breach international law understand the consequences of what they are doing if we are, on the face of it, doing exactly the same ourselves?

I have some sympathy for the noble Baroness because she has gallantly sought to defend the Government’s position. However, I finish by offering her some advice: Oliver Cromwell, in a substantial disagreement with the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, wrote on 3 August 1650—the language is perhaps of its time:

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”


The language may no longer be appropriate, but the sentiment is surely something to which she should give effect.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB) [V]]

I wish to speak briefly in support of Amendment 3 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, and others. I say at the outset that I will not be able to match the eloquence of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, who preceded me and whose views I totally share.

I speak in support of this amendment, as I did in Committee, on the grounds of both principle and pragmatism. The arguments of principle that underpin this amendment are clear. Unamended, the Bill would effectively—de facto if not de jure—open the door to a time limitation on the inquiry into and, where justified, the prosecution of the most heinous of crimes set out in the Rome statute, establishing the International Criminal Court—war crimes and genocide—and those set out in the convention against torture.

I say gently to the Minister that I was a bit disappointed that, in one of her replies to earlier amendments, she suggested that the suggestion that this was a de facto limitation was quite wrong. I question what she said then because if it is not a de facto limitation, what on earth is the point of the Bill? I really do not understand it. I happen to support the main thrust of the Bill.

Neither the Rome statute nor the torture convention provides for any such time limitation on the crimes covered by them, nor in my view should they do so for crimes of that extraordinary seriousness. I suggest that to allow such a limitation into our domestic legislation is not consistent with this Parliament’s ratification of the Rome statute and of our acceptance of the jurisdiction of the ICC. At a time when there is so much evidence worldwide of these sorts of crimes being committed—the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has spoken movingly about them—we should not be playing fast and loose with our own obligations to inquire into them and to prosecute.

The arguments of pragmatism are equally compelling. Unamended, the Bill will actually increase, not decrease, the chances of British service personnel falling within the purview of the ICC. We know that because we have been explicitly warned of it by the court’s prosecutor, who has hitherto relied on our willingness to prosecute crimes under the Rome statute as a sufficient reason not to pursue such cases through the ICC machinery. If that commitment were in any way removed or questioned, the chances of action by the ICC would sharply increase. I was glad to hear the Minister, in responding to earlier amendments, recognise that that risk really exists. It would be a supreme and shameful irony if action by the ICC had to be taken by the recently appointed ICC prosecutor, a British national.

I hope that the House will amend the Bill in the sense proposed to remove from it any limitations of time for crimes set out in the Rome statute and the torture convention and will do so without in any way calling into question the original objective of the Bill: to lift the shadow of vexatious inquiries and prosecutions for lesser offences from our service personnel.

[Baroness Blower (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick. I support Amendment 3. As your Lordships may know, I have no legal or military experience and therefore enter this debate today as someone who has listened to and participated in all previous stages of the Bill, and has been powerfully persuaded that my own concerns about the Bill at the outset were rightly felt.

As did the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, I shall quote from the conclusion of the recent executive summary of the briefing from the Bingham Centre:

“The UK has a long and proud reputation of decisive action against war crimes. This Bill weakens that reputation. It makes it harder, not easier to stamp out abuses that our own troops have committed. We do not protect British troops and British values by hiding from the truth or acting with impunity.”


Although it invokes “British values”, surely these are international values, based on the international rule of law.

The UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, quoted previously by my noble friend Lord Robertson, this week urged the UK Government to heed the warnings that the Bill in its current form risks undermining the human rights obligations that the UK has committed itself to respecting. As a former teacher, when people make a commitment to respect something, I expect them to follow through.

The UN press release says:

“In its present form, the proposed legislation raises substantial questions about the UK’s future compliance with its international obligations, particularly under the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment … as well as the … Geneva Conventions. These include obligations to prevent, investigate and prosecute acts such as torture and unlawful killing, and make no distinction as to when the offences were committed … ‘The prohibition of torture in international law is both clear and absolute,’ Bachelet said. ‘Article 2 of the Convention against Torture is unequivocal, stating that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”’ The obligations in the Convention to investigate and prosecute such allegations recognize none of the new distinctions that the Bill would now bring into law.”


Surely that is a reason for amendment.

Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard
Tuesday 9th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 14 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Robertson, Lord Alton, Lord West and Lord Campbell, and Amendment 36 in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead. In doing so, I apologise for not having spoken on Second Reading, due to an inadvertent mistake over timing.

I back the amendments not out of any objection to the Bill as a whole. The Bill’s objectives are laudable ones of giving protection to our service personnel against vexatious inquiries and prosecutions. However, the Bill as drafted actually increases those risks rather than reduces them. I oppose these defects, which the amendments seek to remedy on the grounds of both practicality and principle. The practical problem is a very obvious one. While the Bill places limitations in time in our domestic law on the pursuit of inquiries and prosecutions, it does not and cannot impose such limitations with respect to our international obligations under the Rome statute, which established the International Criminal Court and which Parliament ratified and gave effect to before its entry into force. The Rome statute, in whose negotiation we participated fully—I was myself involved to a modest extent when I was the UK’s Permanent Representative to the UN in 1995—contains no such limitations with respect to the crimes identified in the statute. The risk is therefore, as many other noble Lords have said, that our service personnel could be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court even though we had declined, under the provisions of this Bill, to take any action.

That is no theoretical risk. Quite recently, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court decided not to pursue cases against our personnel on the explicit grounds that we had domestic legislation to deal with the alleged offences and had demonstrated our willingness to use it. This could therefore be a case, I fear, of being out of the frying pan and into the fire if we do not take steps to remove from the scope of the Bill the extraordinarily serious offences set out in the Rome statute.

The argument of principle in favour of these amendments leads on from the practical argument. The International Criminal Court is an important part of that rules-based international system which the Government have argued, quite correctly in my view, that it is in our national interest to sustain. In recent years, the Government have done a good job in doing precisely that against the intemperate onslaughts of the Trump Administration against the International Criminal Court. Here, however, we are being asked to legislate in a way that could put us in contradiction with our obligations under the Rome statute. That clearly is not a sensible or principled thing to do. At worst, it could lead to British service personnel being prosecuted unnecessarily in the ICC, which would inevitably lead to an outcry in this country, possibly challenging the basis of our membership. Less dramatically, it will be seen by the critics and opponents of the International Criminal Court around the world—in places like Russia and China, and the US in some parts of the body politic—as a weakening of our support of the court and as undermining its authority. For both the reasons of practicality and principle, I hope that the Government will, before we get to Report, reconsider these flawed aspects of the Bill and remedy them.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I doubt that many people would dispute that Britain’s foreign policy—its role in the world—played only a minimal part in the recent general election and figured only marginally in the Queen’s Speech we are debating today, so this is surely a moment when we need to address those issues. This is all the more necessary because we are living through a period of considerable turmoil and disruption, some of it caused by our closest ally, the United States, and we will be embarking on these troubled waters in our new post-Brexit capacity, with less ability to influence policy developments in both Brussels and Washington than we had in the past. Power relationships are shifting, often in ways that do not favour us and our allies and friends. The framework of the rules-based international order, which we ourselves did so much to create over the past 75 years, is being challenged and shaken to its foundations.

During 2020 we will participate in four important international gatherings which will do much to shape the world we live in, for better or for worse, and determine our collective response to some of the main global challenges we face. These four are the nuclear non-proliferation treaty’s quinquennial review in May, which is incidentally the treaty’s 50th anniversary; the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Kazakhstan in the summer; the stocktaking on the UN’s sustainable development goals, five years into their 15-year span, in the autumn; and, at the end of the year, the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow on climate change.

The background to the NPT review conference in May is certainly not encouraging. The risks of nuclear war, whether by accident or design, are on the rise; the golden era, from the end of the Cold War in the 1980s until about 2015, when we felt able to discount any chance of nuclear war, has ended; arms control agreements are eroding, with the INF gone and New START, limiting Russian and US strategic weapons, needing renewal next year; and the NPT itself, a cornerstone of international peace and security, is living dangerously, with challenges from North Korea and Iran. How best can the world be moved back on to a path of incremental disarmament and arms control? Can a dialogue on strategic stability between the world’s principal nuclear weapons states, such as existed even at the height of the Cold War, be resumed? Can nuclear weapons states’ military doctrines be made more transparent? Can it be stated again that a nuclear war must not be fought and cannot be won? All these and more questions need to be addressed. I would like to hear how the Government plan to address them during our current rotating chairmanship of the P5 recognised nuclear weapon states, and in New York in May.

On the second event, world trade, for so long an engine of global economic growth, is in the doldrums, disrupted by trade wars, by the unilateral flouting of international rules and by the paralysis of the WTO’s dispute settlement procedures as a result of the US refusal to allow the appointment of new panellists. No part of the rules-based international order is under greater and more immediate threat than the WTO. What plans do the Government have to reverse that trend and to circumvent the paralysis of dispute settlement procedures if the US cannot be persuaded to relent? What prospects are there for plurilateral agreements on trade in services and on digital exchanges, on which so much of our economy now depends? A ministerial answer to these questions would be welcome.

On the sustainable development goals, it would be good to hear how the Government intend to put to good use our leadership role due to the commitment we have made to 0.7% of GNI. How do they see the main thrusts of that expenditure being developed? What are the main shortfalls in the SDGs which need to be remedied this coming autumn, and how will the Government set about doing it?

The task facing COP 26 in Glasgow is a formidable one, whose daunting nature has been underlined by the relative failure of COP 25 in Madrid last month, and it will have to be done without any help at all from our principal ally, the US. It will require advocacy and diplomacy at the highest political level, as was deployed by France when the Paris agreement was put together some years ago. It will also require us to set an example—in actions, not just in words—with our own domestic environmental policies. All the diplomatic advocacy we deploy in the run-up to Glasgow will count for little if we are not putting our money where our mouth is. It would be good to hear something of that in the Government’s plans.

All that is to come in 2020, as well as the 75th anniversary of the UN’s founding. How well we rise to these four challenges will certainly test the claims the Government have made that Brexit will enhance and not diminish our influence in the world. We shall see. That we need to address them with seriousness and determination is surely not in doubt.

D-day: 75th Anniversary

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, a commemorative debate, such as we are having today, needs both to look back to the event being commemorated and to situate the lessons from that event in the context of today, never more so than in the present instance when the controversy surrounding the state visit of President Trump risks overshadowing the real and continuing significance of D-day. First and foremost, we should salute the courage and the sacrifice of those Americans, Canadians and others who joined our own Armed Forces in a truly unprecedented military operation that led a year later to the liberation of Europe. Let us face it: they saved our bacon and helped deliver a victory that we could not have delivered on our own.

Are we sufficiently grateful? I sometimes doubt it. For example, why have we not, as the French have so generously done towards our D-day veterans, honoured all those surviving? Should we not now be honouring all surviving US veterans of D-day? I think we should. In the context of today, we need to realise that the Anglo-American alliance remains as important to our continued security as it was then. This is easy to forget when the Trump Administration take a whole range of decisions contrary to our view of our national interest—for example, on policy towards Iran, on the United Nations, on climate change and on trade policy—and does so without paying much attention to our own Government’s views. But we must not let our criticisms of and our opposition to this Administration metamorphose into that ugly brand of anti-Americanism which so disfigured our politics 40 years ago. We must do our best to ensure that the NATO summit to be held in this city in December strengthens the alliance and demonstrates its continuing validity.

Then there are the lessons of D-day for our own place in Europe, of which we are an integral part, not just geographically but culturally, economically and historically. Our failure to recognise the full implications of that in the 1920s and 1930s contributed to our having to fight our way ashore in Normandy 75 years ago.

There are of course no direct analogies with the present day but we need to realise that no isolation-from-Europe option for our present predicament is available to us that will not damage our future prosperity and security. We need to remember that D-day was fought to uphold a range of values—democracy, freedom of thought and speech, and many others—that were eloquently set out in the Atlantic Charter, which was drawn up by Roosevelt and Churchill two years or so before D-day, and which then became those of the United Nations when that organisation was founded in 1945. Among a lot of loose talk in recent months about the rebirth of nationalism, we need to recognise that our compatriots died to uphold those values and we must not desert them now.

Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, we should all be extremely grateful to the most reverend Primate—as I certainly am—for having chosen, as the theme for the annual debate on which he leads, a topic which looks outwards to the rest of the world and not inwards, as the national obsession with Brexit tempts us to do. He has done so at a time when the rules-based international order, to whose construction this country has devoted so much time, effort and resolve, is under fundamental challenge, not least from our closest ally, the United States. It is a time when wars between states are less frequent than wars within states, which are typically those that most urgently require reconciliation when they are over if they are not to recur. One has only to look at the successive killing orgies between the Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi for an example. It is a time too when tensions between those professing different religions, or even in some cases between different branches of the same religions, are on the rise in a manner not seen since Europe was convulsed by them in the 17th century and lost a considerable proportion of its population.

What can we in Britain hope to do in the face of those threats? First, we can work to strengthen the efforts of the United Nations to prevent conflict, to resolve conflicts and build peace where some peace has been achieved, and to promote human rights. An example of what the United Nations can do was yesterday’s events in Stockholm, when the appalling civil war in Yemen was brought to a very temporary halt by an agreement on exchange of prisoners and by the opening of the port of Hodeidah. Do not let us throw our hats in the air—this is the beginning of a very long road that will require a great deal of reconciliation as well as a great deal of statesmanship by all concerned, but it shows what the UN is capable of when it gets the support of its principal members.

Of those members, Britain, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has a duty to strengthen the UN. As a medium-ranking power with global interests, we have a major interest in doing so. Therefore, we should provide more resources to the UN’s role in conflict prevention. I believe that we should contribute more troops to UN peacekeeping missions, and we should make a reality of the responsibility to protect, not so much in terms of military intervention, which must always remain a last resort, but in using every diplomatic and economic tool in the international toolbox to prevent wars breaking out and to prevent gross breaches of international humanitarianism—war, massacres and genocide—which have often occurred.

Secondly, we need to put to the best possible use our commitment to devoting 0.7% of our gross national income to aid and development, and defend that commitment against those—there are plenty of them—who wish to reverse it. I applaud the Government’s decision to devote a substantial proportion of that commitment to fragile and failing states, where very often there can be no effective development until there is security and reconciliation. That commitment, too, ensures that we play a leading role in the effort to implement, by 2030, the UN’s sustainable development goals, which constitute the essential underpinning of reconciliation in fractured societies.

Thirdly, we need a bit of humility when approaching reconciliation. It cannot successfully be imposed from the outside; nor can it be successfully imposed from the top down. The most reverend Primate made that point very effectively. It has to come from the citizens of the countries concerned if it is to be durable. It requires that we do far more to nurture the growth of non-governmental organisations and other institutions of civil society in countries at risk. It requires too the nurturing in those countries of the rule of law, which is every bit as important as democracy. It requires us to strengthen the application of our own laws to ensure that we are in no way complicit in genocide, war crimes, bribery, money laundering or the payment of ransoms—whether openly criminal acts are involved or it is merely aid to oppressive Governments.

What can and should we do against the emergence of religious fundamentalism around the world? It is by no means confined to Muslim countries. There are plenty of Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Jewish fundamentalists who do not believe in the value of tolerance for other religions. The Church of which the most reverend Primate is leader does believe in those values, and that is admirable. It helps to promote reconciliation.

What can be done? Most importantly, we must avoid lumping any advocate of religions other than our own together into a single category, as if to be judged by the crimes committed by the small minority in their ranks. We must realise that there are many hundreds of millions of devout Muslims who bitterly condemn the crimes committed in the name of their religion by IS, al-Qaeda and Boko Haram. The manifestations of Islamophobia in this country—and, alas, occasionally even in this House—will only serve to strengthen the fringe movements to which I referred.

In this new epoch, in which—Brexit or no Brexit—this country will need to navigate and to shape its international policies, we will need more co-operation and joint effort with other countries. That is why I found the call to re-invent separate national identities in the speech by the US Secretary of State in Brussels last week, which fortunately did not get a lot of press coverage, completely aberrant. We Europeans tried that prescription in the first half of the 20th century and it was not a huge success. Let us not go there again but rather follow the precepts of reconciliation, support for a rules-based international order and tolerance, which are at the heart of the most reverend Primate’s own teaching and advocacy.

Counter-Daesh Update

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 7th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

I can give the noble Lord that assurance. Clearly, we do not want to move assets back when it may turn out that they are needed in theatre again. I am not aware of what decisions are being taken on that front, but we are clear that we do not want to wreck our chances of playing the part we want to play in the coalition.

As for identifying returnees, I asked my officials that very question before this debate and am assured that mechanisms are in place to identify returnees at the border, even if iris recognition is not in place. The names of those on the wanted list are very clear and have been distributed, and I am advised that the mechanisms are secure in that respect.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

Will the Minister perhaps cast some light on a point that was not covered in the Statement—the situation on the border between Turkey and Syria, where there are substantial Kurdish forces? He spoke about the Kurdish situation in the part of Iraq ruled by the regional Government, but not the tensions that exist between the Kurds in Syria and Turkey. There is a real risk that the coalition, which has so successfully dealt with Daesh thus far, will now start fighting among themselves. Could he confirm, too, that the evidence of the UN inquiry that the Assad regime still has chemical weapons means that that regime is in contravention of the chemical weapons convention, which it was persuaded to sign four years ago, and that, in any peace settlement, the chemical weapons convention organisation will need to have complete access to all sites in Syria and to be able to ensure that never again are chemical weapons kept, stored or used there?

[Earl Howe]

I can tell the noble Lord that Syria is certainly in breach of the chemical weapons convention, which it is a party to. I am aware that those charged with investigating the manufacture and use of chemical weapons in Syria are seeking access to the relevant sites, and no doubt news on that score will emerge as the days pass. As regards clashes between Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish Peshmerga, we are aware of reports of violence between those forces. However, we very much welcome the discussions brokered by the global coalition to co-ordinate security arrangements between the parties so as to avoid violence, and we have called upon all parties to continue to de-escalate the situation and refrain from provocative statements which could lead to conflict. It is critical that all parties quickly refocus on our shared priority: the fight against Daesh, preventing its re-emergence and working together to rebuild liberated towns and villages, and lives.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, this is the first debate on the Address since last June’s referendum resulted in a narrow majority in favour of leaving the EU. It is also the first since the assumption of office by a new US president, Donald Trump, whose “America First” slogan, and, even more so, policies on climate change, trade issues, NATO, the UN and human rights, put him at cross purposes with our own policy objectives. Therefore, I make no apologies for focusing my remarks on these two matters and their consequences for our own foreign policy-making.

Much of the debate about Brexit concentrates on important, but often quite narrow and technical, questions of trade in both goods and services, the status of EU nationals, including our own, and our future domestic policies on regulation, immigration, agriculture and fisheries. That is, of course, exactly as it should be, and those aspects will be debated later in this debate next week. They are important matters. We must not, however, overlook the wider strategic consequences of our decision to leave the EU in terms of Europe’s security and the future direction of the European Union’s foreign policies. It seems to have been almost completely overlooked at the time of our vote last June that we risked turning our backs on something like 500 years of British foreign policy, during which we played an integral—often crucial—part in the formulation of policies relating to European security and the balance of power among our nearest neighbours—an area you could describe as stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, to coin a phrase. Now we risk becoming not just semi-detached but fully detached from that tradition, and that to our cost, I suggest, as we found in earlier periods when we occasionally drifted off into isolation.

It is no good thinking that these risks can be avoided simply by repeating meaningless mantras such as, “We are leaving the EU, but not leaving Europe”. Nor is NATO a full answer to the problem, although it is certainly part of the answer. It seems that the problem requires us to fashion a close, operationally effective relationship on foreign and security policy with the European Union, and in particular with its principal members, France and Germany. Several other previous speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Howell, concentrated on that point. I hope that the Minister will say something about how we plan to set about doing that when he replies to the debate, because so far we have heard nothing but aspirations in this area.

Then there are the challenges we face from across the Atlantic, not just from the erratic and intemperate policy pronouncements which have so far been the hallmark of the Trump Administration. There are more fundamental problems than that. The policies of that Administration are already undermining the whole structure of a rules-based international community, which successive British Governments have, over the last 70 years, worked so hard to create and on which our own future prosperity and security will rely to an even greater extent if and when we leave the European Union. An adequate response cannot simply consist of the rather feeble kinds of triangulation which presumably motivated our refusal to sign up to the statement of France, Germany and Italy when the US notified its decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change, nor the rather pusillanimous attitude we have taken to supporting a two-state solution to the problem of Palestine. Nor is—I am afraid that I agree with my noble friend Lord Ricketts—the untimely invitation to President Trump to make a state visit to London this year likely to help very much. Perhaps the Minister could elucidate what the absence of a reference to that in the gracious Speech is meant to mean. However, of course we must not fall back into that knee-jerk anti-Americanism which has so often been a feature of the left in British politics. That relationship of the United States will be of crucial value to this country long beyond the tenure in office of a particular US President.

The two themes I have mentioned criss-cross when one examines the chaos in the Middle East, a set of issues which were addressed in the report of your Lordships’ International Relations Committee, which several other speakers have mentioned and which I very much trust we shall have an opportunity to debate in full before the Summer Recess. The intemperate nature of US policy-making has been clear in the Middle East most recently in the rhetorical onslaught against Iran, which took place only two days after the very welcome re-election of President Rouhani, who said that he was committed to greater engagement with the outside world. To stoke up Saudi-Iranian rivalry is not in Britain’s interest. Plenty of criticism can be levied against some aspects of Iran’s external policy. However, I hope that we will work for a kind of modus vivendi between these two important regional powers, not organise a Thirty Years’ War between Sunni and Shia. Perhaps the Minister can say how we view the current tensions between members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which have broken out in the bans on travel between a number of Qatar’s neighbours and that emirate. That, too, does not seem to be likely to move the region into a better place.

Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2017

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I participate in this debate, which is after all mainly about defence policy, but I do so because in my view the international rules-based order is under greater and more existential challenge than it has ever been since our predecessors began to piece it together amid the ruins of two catastrophic world wars. I do so also because those challenges and the necessary responses to them cannot be confined to the spheres of defence and security policy; they need to go much wider than that.

To understand this, along with the need for a wider vision and response, we need only look at the period between the two world wars. Of course history does not repeat itself exactly, but it does contain plenty of lessons that we would be foolish to ignore. The world experienced then a perfect storm in which economic, political and military developments fused into a single mass which overwhelmed the totally inadequate rules and international institutions that had been established after the First World War. The 1929 stock market crash led to mass unemployment, trade protectionism and tit-for-tat monetary devaluations. These and other factors fuelled the rise of populist political parties across Europe, while the weakened democracies averted their eyes and turned inwards. Does that sound familiar? Is there any parallel with the faltering response to the financial crisis of 2008-09 and the emergence of political forces such as those which propelled Donald Trump to the White House and are fuelling the political bids of Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Beppe Grillo? It is not an exact parallel, of course, but it is quite enough to cause us to worry very seriously.

I will look at three pillars of our rules-based order which are under threat: the open global trading system, symbolised by the World Trade Organization; the nuclear non-proliferation treaty; and the functions of the UN with respect to international peace and security. The arrival in the White House of a President and a trade policy team who seem to regard protectionism as a path to prosperity, and bilateral trade balances as something to be eliminated by any means, including by measures that would run roughshod over WTO rules, is a challenge to all of us, and in particular to this country which has, quite rightly in my view, nailed its post-Brexit colours to the mast of being a champion of free trade. That will require more than just words. It will require standing up to the forces of mercantilism and protectionism wherever they emerge and defending the rules of the WTO. If we fail, we will end up poorer and less able to generate the resources we need to defend ourselves and our allies, in NATO or elsewhere.

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty has been for a considerable time now one of the cornerstones of our rules-based world, but has been under considerable stress for some years, particularly from North Korea, which cheated on its obligations under the treaty and then withdrew, and from Iran, whose nuclear programmes gave much legitimate cause for concern. The only thing the two challenges have in common, I suggest, is that in neither case is a military response either sensible or to be anticipated or planned for, other than as an extremely last resort. There is no doubt about the immediacy and reality of the challenge from North Korea. Clearly, our own position can only be an ancillary one, but do the Government share the view that China has to be a key player in any effective response? Antagonising China, either politically or in trade policy terms, is unlikely to be the best way of securing its support.

As to Iran, we have the rather oddly acronymed JCPOA. Can the noble Earl confirm that the Government’s policy is to remain committed to that agreement and its rigorous implementation, whatever the US attitude may turn out to be? Is that policy properly understood in Washington? Is it not time, too, that we began thinking about globalising and generalising the constraints in the Iran agreement, thus extending its duration, which is rather on the short side, and ceasing to make it so Iran-specific, which makes it less attractive to Iran?

The United Nations, too, is under stress, even as it has more than 100,000 peacekeepers, both military and civilian, deployed worldwide. Often, as in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, they are the only forces that fulfil the responsibility to protect civilians—forces that the rulers of those countries are either unwilling or unable to provide. The Government’s decision to strengthen our commitments to UN peacekeeping in South Sudan and Somalia is very welcome. Can the Minister say something about the Government’s medium and long-term policies on UN peacekeeping? Is the shift in policy we have seen in the last year here to stay? Is it built in to our security strategy and destined to play a more prominent part in it than has been the case in the recent past?

Others have covered the crucial issue of NATO and the uncertainties about its deterrent capacity as a result of some of the things that the new President of the United States said during his election campaign. My neglect of that issue merely shows, I think, what an extremely wide scope for debate today has offered us and how important it is to focus on all parts of it.

Multilateral Disarmament

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

The noble Lord makes some very good points. Among the actions that the UK has recently been taking is work with Norway on disarmament verification, as my noble friend Lord Trefgarne referred to. We initiated the P5 process in 2009 to bring together nuclear weapons states to build the trust and confidence that I referred to. We proposed a programme of work at the conference on disarmament held in Geneva in February this year with the aim of reinvigorating the conference’s work—in fact, that was eventually blocked but we made a good attempt at it—and we continue to press for the entry into force of a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. So there is work that we are trying to push along.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, are the Government giving any thought to globalising and generalising some of the constraints in the agreement between Iran and the P5+1, thus building a basis on which that agreement could extend far longer than the 15 years it will currently last?

[Earl Howe]

I completely take the noble Lord’s point. It is early days to be thinking in those terms, although he is right to do so. It is encouraging that the November IAEA report to the board of governors confirmed that Iran remains compliant with the nuclear-related measures set out in the joint comprehensive plan of action. We welcome the findings of the DG’s report. We praised the IAEA for its progress and continued work on that very challenging task, but no doubt lessons and messages will emerge from that strand of work.

Counter-Daesh: Quarterly Update

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, there is no doubt that Syria needs transition to a new Government able to meet the needs of the Syrian people as a whole. That is why our position on Assad is unchanged. That regime is responsible for the current crisis in Syria. The barbarity it has meted out—the barrel bombs, the chlorine, the siege tactics, the interception of medical supplies to those in need—is the main driver of the refugee crisis. We do not think that Assad can form any possible part of a future regime, and the transition has to take place by another means.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister enlighten the House as to how many elections President Assad won without the will of the people?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I am sure the noble Lord is better informed than I am of the political history of Syria. There is no doubt that Assad does not now command the support he once clearly did.