Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, talked about the elimination of all chemical weapons. It is a chilling thought that the Syrian Arab Republic is one of only five states that have neither signed nor acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1992. The others are Somalia, North Korea, Angola and Egypt. Two states have signed but not ratified the convention: Myanmar and Israel. So there are two countries in close proximity, one of which has not signed or ratified the convention—Syria—and the other, Israel, that has not ratified it.

The prohibition of chemical weapons was not novel, even at the time of the Geneva Convention of 1925. The Brussels Convention of 1874 prohibited the employment of poison or poisoned weapons and the use of arms, projectiles or material to cause unnecessary suffering. Its aims were restated in 1899 in the Hague Convention, whose parties declared their agreement to abstain from the use of projectiles the sole object of which was the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases. Of course, that convention proved futile in the First World War, which resulted in 100,000 deaths and 1 million casualties from gas.

The 1925 convention was more successful. Many of us in this House may remember the constrictions on the cheeks and the smell of rubber from the wartime infant gas masks, some of which were bizarrely made to look like Mickey Mouse. We had cause to be thankful that gas, although expected, was not widely used—or used at all in the Second World War in the European theatre. But it was used by the Italians against the Ethiopians in 1936, by the Japanese against the Chinese in 1938 and of course, as many speakers have mentioned, in the Iraq/Iran war in the 1980s. There must be the gravest concern to ensure that it is not used in any Syrian conflict.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, posed the question: what happened? We must find out not merely whether chemical weapons were used but exactly what happened. There are assertions in the document produced as the UK Government’s legal position which can be challenged. For example, it is said that the large-scale use of chemical weapons by the regime in a heavily populated area is a war crime, and it is likely that the regime will seek to use the weapons again. The question that must have occurred to your Lordships when we had news of these terrible events was why on earth would Assad, the president, use poison gas of some form or another when the United Nations investigators were actually there? Why would he do it?

The only solution I can think of is that somewhere below him in the chain of command some commander, maybe of a relatively junior rank to whom responsibility for guarding these weapons or using them had been delegated, had taken leave of his senses and employed them in the shocking way that we have heard. If that is so, what is our response to be? Is it without further investigation simply to bomb and shell or strike at targets in Syria with the inevitable consequence that innocent civilians would be killed?

I have heard Ministers, the Prime Minister and others say that it is all a question of judgment. But judgment normally follows the evidence. Judgment does not come first. A great deal more investigation must be undertaken into what happened to ascertain the facts before we can inflict on the population of Syria that which is proposed.

The responsibility to protect doctrine, which it is suggested was a cloak for the Government in earlier conflicts—and I will not go into that—is not a new idea. It has been at the heart of United Nations General Assembly discussions since 1946. The International Law Commission spent more than 70 years before the 2005 United Nations conference discussing the principles that should be applied. But it concluded, even after all its considerations in 2005, that the Security Council is still the only means through which a state can legally intervene in the affairs of another state. It is essential that, when the evidence is clear, the matter goes back to the Security Council because I believe that if the evidence is clear to the world all members of the Security Council will unite in their condemnation of something that has been recognised as abhorrent for getting on for 150 years.