Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill [HL]

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, one of the advantages of being well down the speakers list is that a lot of what you were going to say has been said. I welcome the Bill. I am pleased that the Minister is here. It shows the range of her expertise—the last time we were here together was during the passage of the Trade Union Act. I notice that when she has finished on armed conflict, she will move on to British Home Stores—which is probably another version of armed conflict to come.

I am not sure whether these are interests or just background but I have been associated with two events that I would say are relevant. First, I am a patron of an outfit called the Dresden Trust, which was established to rebuild the Frauenkirche in Dresden. I mention that because when I became interested in Dresden, I also became interested in the impact of war on populations. There is no doubt who bombed Dresden but there is also a history that came about after the bombing, and a lot of that history was to do with looting by impoverished German citizens who had no money or artefacts to live on and who used the proceeds of the churches and many of the other buildings that were open to looting to feed themselves and their families. The point I make is not that it is right but that it is sometimes understandable. I am pleased to see my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, in the Chamber. He is also a patron of the Dresden Trust.

I make that point because this is a complex area and a complex Bill. One other item I want to mention is how long these matters can take. For a time I was associated with an outfit called the Ethiopia Society, which had a gentleman called Professor Pankhurst, who worked tirelessly to get what was called the Axum obelisk repatriated from Italy, where it had been taken after the Abyssinian war, back to Ethiopia. An agreement was brokered by the United Nations in 1947, and the obelisk got back to Axum in 2008—61 years after. I just make the point in passing that cultural agreements can often take a lot of implementing.

As for the content of the Bill, there is a tendency to inflation of imprisonment, and I think that 30 years—going up from two years—is an extraordinarily long prison sentence to provide for. I will not propose any amendments on this, but I note that it is rather disproportionate given the prison sentences we have. I was also interested to see in the briefing from Historic England that only five countries—a pretty random lot, consisting of Azerbaijan, Belgium, Cyprus, Italy and Lithuania—have identified a combined total of 10 sites for enhanced protection. That is after 12 years of the convention being in place. Could a move be made to look at whether all world heritage sites should be given enhanced protection automatically under the convention?

In the definition of cultural property, the convention refers to,

“groups of buildings which, as a whole, are of historical or artistic interest”.

However, Article 6 of the Second Protocol, under the heading, “Respect for cultural property”, says that a “waiver” to the convention, allowing you to take action against this class of building,

“may … be invoked to direct an act of hostility against cultural property when and for as long as”,

two exemptions apply. One of those is where,

“there is no feasible alternative available”.

You could have a very long debate about that, and many people would say, “Well, there was no feasible alternative; there was nothing we could do”.

The noble Lord, Lord Renfrew, mentioned that this is about occupying states. My final point is that a lot of conflict today is not between states but civil war. Last week, I was in Turkey, where there is a conflict—which I do not propose to adjudicate—between the PKK and the Turkish military authorities. In south-east Turkey there is a city called Diyarbakir, which has a very old, long-standing, historic centre. That has more or less been destroyed because one group of people, identified with the PKK, has used it as a base for street-to-street, house-to-house fighting. The Turkish army—rightly, probably—in trying to regain control over the city, has more or less destroyed a significant part of that inner city, which has happened within the last few weeks.

I knew little about this until I got to Turkey, because it has not been widely reported in the English-language press, but it is a very good example of where the convention and the Bill will not cover much at all, because the clause I read out about exemptions could clearly be invoked by the Turkish army, and of course the PKK is not a member state anyway. The Bill is very useful and I congratulate the Government on bringing it forward, but one thing that has to come to mind when we think about it is that it covers only a small part of the problem and of the consequences that arise from terrible actions of this kind.