Queen’s Speech

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the integrated review states:

“We will also build upon our close security partnerships, including with Israel and Saudi Arabia, to better protect our interests in the region.”


I urge the Government not to forget their long-standing true allies in the Middle East, despite the untruths and hatred that have spewed forth in the past week in connection with the Israel-Hamas dispute. I call for a fair and open-minded assessment of the situation, with a perspective from British history and in relation to the rest of the Middle East. The UK should join any eventual international effort to rehabilitate Gaza within some negotiated peace plan or political framework designed to resolve the area’s fundamental problems. That effort has to be led by the US, Qatar and Egypt, for it is Egypt that borders Gaza and has the power to open that border without ill result.

Sadly, the Biden Administration seem to have no plan save to revert to the deadly Iran nuclear deal, following in the footsteps of Obama and ignoring the benefit of hindsight. I urge the Government not to follow Biden and not to join in an effort to remove sanctions against Iran, thereby enabling it to continue to smuggle weapons, to continue its terrorist activities and, of course, to support Hamas in its drive to dominate the Middle East. Resurrecting the JCPOA will free Iran sooner or later to continue to enrich uranium and hide its military sites from inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Resurrecting the ineffective 2015 nuclear deal would allow billions of dollars to flow into the regime which will not be used for its suffering people. Iran has been arming Hamas for years. It wants to destroy the Abraham accords and any new concept of a co-operative Middle East. It is Biden’s apparent appeasement of Iran which lies behind the present chaos, along with Abbas’s cancellation of elections.

Hamas’s aim is not a state of Palestine, for that has been rejected several times over the years; it is the replacement of Israel by an Islamist state and the removal of every last Jew from Israel, just as all Jews have been dispossessed, persecuted, expelled, forbidden to live in or killed in that area. Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, Libya, Yemen and Lebanon are all Judenrein. The truth is that the dominant powers there cannot accept any Jewish presence in the area, and that is why ordinary negotiations between Israel and the others cannot succeed. Israel is the only state on earth whose enemies want to wipe it off the face of the earth.

Meanwhile we have taken our eyes of the real issues in that area. Syria appears to have been discussed in this House only once in the past year. Some 400,000 people have been killed there, including many Palestinians; 6 million people have been internally displaced and more than 6 million have fled. Its horrors and those of Lebanon, Yemen and Afghanistan make no mark. The Turks launched an attack on the Kurds, and there was no reaction. Islamists killed 94 Afghan schoolchildren and a Kabul mosque was bombed, and there was no reaction. Will the Minister proscribe Hamas in full to curb its actions?

The other action this country can take in order to calm the atmosphere is to withdraw from the forthcoming follow-up conference of the Durban racism conference of 2001. That conference degenerated into a hate-filled anti-Semitic meeting uniquely critical of Israel, giving cover to the real human rights abusers of the world. Attendees at the conference compared its anti-Jewish hysteria to 1930s Germany. The track record of Durban has been to harm race relations, poison progress and encourage anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and attacks. The USA, Australia and Canada have withdrawn from the Durban conference, and it is expected that other democratic countries will also do so, judging by their non-participation in previous follow-up conferences. I join the noble Lord, Lord Polak, in asking the Government to act to curb vicious anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Israel activity. Will the Government withdraw from Durban right now?

Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Baroness Deech Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 20th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB) [V]]

My Lords, this is a difficult subject: a complex Bill, which, despite its detractors, is not as bad from the perspective of human rights as it looks on first reading. Members of the Armed Forces should not be hounded for the rest of their lives, having acted to protect us in, and from, circumstances that most of us could never imagine, so I hesitate to pontificate on their actions.

However, there is a feeling of unfairness, given the perception that so many terrorists escape justice. Also, one’s instincts are that there should not be a statute of limitations for war crimes—I would be the first to say that Nazi criminals should be pursued and prosecuted for the rest of their lives—so it is worth considering whether to exclude all war crimes from the five-year regime.

The Bill will not prevent prosecution of serious allegations of torture which are supported by evidence, but filters prosecutions that take place after the lapse of five years. During those five years, all the usual rules for prosecutions apply, with no holds barred, and there is no guarantee of immunity from prosecution after five years. A judgment that it should happen might still be made if it is in the public interest and the evidence is sufficient, as well as other pertinent considerations. A similar limitation is present in Part 2, which imposes a six-year time limit on claims by service personnel injured through negligence during overseas operations. It might be better, in the alternative, to set up a scheme of no-fault compensation rather than putting the injured and their families through the court system.

The Bill emphasises the possibility of derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights in relation to overseas operations. That derogation should only ever be exceptional and should certainly not be normalised. It must be remembered that derogation can be challenged in our courts and in the Court of Human Rights. There are other situations in the law where the consent of the Attorney-General is required before prosecution; this is therefore not exceptional.

The important standard in all these discussions should be the law of the International Criminal Court. I posit that it should be avoided at all costs and that decisions and operations in scope of this Bill should be carried out in the shadow of the law—namely, the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction. None of the largest states with the largest armed forces is party to the treaty of Rome which established the court—China, India, Russia and the US—with the honourable exception of this country, though the Government have rightly indicated that the court needs reform. The court was set up for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. One has but to mention genocide to see how ineffective the court’s jurisdiction has been: too slow, too late, too retrospective and, some say, too Africa-focused.

However, once indicted, an individual’s reputation is gone for ever, even if subsequently cleared. The ICC has recently examined alleged crimes committed by UK nationals in the context of the Iraq conflict and occupation from 2003 to 2008, including murder and torture. After some six years of consideration, the court prosecutor said in December that, although it was reasonable to believe that crimes had been committed and command failures had occurred, the UK was genuinely willing to investigate them and to prosecute.

What should drive decisions to prosecute or not prosecute under this Bill is the standard laid down by the ICC—thoroughness and genuineness. Arguably, military investigations into incidents have been inadequate, insufficiently resourced, insufficiently independent and not done in a timely manner. Nevertheless, what the Bill should control are repeated investigations; it would be wise to restore the view of Lord Bingham, whose name is synonymous with the rule of law, that the Human Rights Act should not have extraterritorial application. Quality of decision-making rather than length of time should be the goal. I suggest that the Bill, once passed, should not start in operation until the investigation scheme has been reformed.