Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill [Lords]

David Warburton Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 31st October 2016 Commons Chamber

[David Warburton (Somerton and Frome) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to talk on this subject, and on this Bill which, as have heard, has been a long time coming. It is of great cultural and symbolic significance. I know the debates in another place have been conducted in a constructive bipartisan spirit, and it is nice to see this debate conducted in the same vein. I am delighted that the Government have found parliamentary time for this type of measure, which has not been achieved in the past. It shows a welcome recognition of the significance and symbolic power of the measures in the Bill.

As the Government have rightly been at pains to point out, it is important to say that although the UK has so far failed to sign up to The Hague convention or the 1954 or 1999 protocols, our armed forces already act absolutely as if they were bound by them; in fact The Hague convention and its protocols form a framework today for both training and armed conflict.

The establishment of the £30 million cultural protection fund, our sponsoring of UN resolution 2199 designed to stop Daesh from transforming cultural destruction into financial profit, and the work of the joint military cultural protection working group all bear witness to the UK’s ongoing commitment to protecting cultural property in spheres of conflict. It is worth emphasising that the successful passage of this Bill would make the UK the first permanent member of the UN Security Council to ratify the convention and accede to both its protocols, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) pointed out. As the House has heard, that has been in the offing for more than 10 years, so it is perhaps a good time to recognise the work of those who prepared the original draft Bill, which bears a striking similarity to the one we are considering today.

As I said, this is a timely moment to be passing such legislation. We recently saw the first person be charged by the International Criminal Court for damaging mankind’s cultural heritage in Timbuktu. Our minds are also concentrated by Daesh’s appalling targeted destruction of cultural sites in north Africa and the middle east, including St Elijah’s monastery, historic libraries and pretty much any other representational art that it comes across.

To talk about the importance of cultural property in conflict is obviously not to undermine in any way the essential truth that the preservation of human life will and should always be the prime motivating factor in the conduct of military operations. That truth is enshrined in the doctrine of military necessity that formed a vital part of the original convention and is strengthened in the second protocol, which we will also be approving should we pass the Bill. The Bill will make a strong statement about the UK’s commitment to the future at a time when such protection is more necessary than ever.

Finally, the Bill, and the convention it ratifies, deals largely with state-to-state conflict. In offering my support, I would be grateful to hear more from the Minister about how the Government will continue to work to provide a similar level of protection in more asymmetric conflicts involving non-state actors such as Daesh. The states and groups that destroy monuments and artistic expression are trying to hide. They are trying to destroy pluralism, thought, inclusivity and diversity in order to reimpose a childishly simplistic, inverted form of good and evil. I do not need to tell the House that cultural heritage enables all peoples to see themselves clearly both as individuals and as members of an historically coherent and culturally significant whole. The House will remember the words of Heinrich Heine, now engraved into the ground where the Nazis burned thousands of books in 1933:

“where they burn books, they will in the end burn people”.