Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, to follow a speech of the quality that we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and to be able to agree with it entirely, is a great privilege. I thank him for making it.

It has been said frequently in this debate that our judgment should be conditioned by experience, but some of your Lordships have been very selective about that experience. We should not simply rely on the last painful experience, or make a particular selection to meet the argument. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and my noble friend Lord Ashdown mentioned Bosnia, which was a lesson to us all of what can happen if you do not take action. Sierra Leone was also mentioned as an example of the benefits that can occur if you do take action. They are part of our experience, too.

As the grandson of a teacher and her postmaster husband who faced state murder by the use of poison gas in sheds, the sight of death by gassing in the streets of Syria raises a painful sense of disgust. The purveyors of those weapons are undoubtedly war criminals who should be brought to justice if at all possible, but I am not prepared to wait for that. They demean their country, one that we all wish to welcome back into the family of nations—but sooner rather than later. My view is that, all other things being equal, if we can act now, it is our duty as a moral component of the international world to do so.

However, those strong feelings alone would not in any way justify military action against Syrian military and political targets. For such action to be justified, it must first be founded on law. Then it must be based on evidence, it must be urgent, it must be necessary, it must be proportionate and, of course, it must be taken against a background of a mass of diplomatic activity. Some of the speeches that we have heard, including those from very distinguished former diplomats, seem to have suggested that we have not begun on any of the diplomatic activity, but we have had years of diplomatic activity—failed diplomatic activity. Now is the time, if at all possible, for the diplomatic activity to stop and for Syria to have a legal and lawful demonstration that the world, or at least part of the world, is prepared to act.

I regret that the, albeit cogent and persuasive, summary of the legal advice that has been given to Parliament and to the public is so short. Both Houses, in my view, had a reasonable expectation of seeing more of the detail, although not, of course, the whole advice—how the doubts weighed against the certainties, the checks against the balances. However, one has to trust one’s Government, at least up to a point. I accept on trust the Government’s legal advice that the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, or responsibility to protect, as it is sometimes called, applies here and that, therefore, the proposed action is lawful.

The essential question, however, is whether it should be taken. Will action play a significant part in removing the use of chemical weapons from disputes taking place on this planet? I believe that the time has come when we have to say yes in answer to that question. If we do not, we will look simply like supine appeasers while other parts of the world take action.

I accept, too, that we must await the evidence that there has been use of chemical weapons—if there be any doubt about that—and that, in that context, we should await the report of the UN inspectors. The UN, in its inspectorial role, is extremely good. I agree, too, that we should take the probably token step of awaiting the deliberative role of the United Nations, but I regret very much that the United Nations in that role is now looking tragically toothless and is simply going through the motions.

It is the role of brave and moral nations on earth, including ourselves wherever possible, to take steps to ensure that international humanitarian law is made to work. In my view, given the evidence that has been produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee, given the opinion that has been given by the Attorney-General, and given the trust in which we place our consciences in the hands of our Prime Minister and, in the case of my party, the Deputy Prime Minister, we should say yes to this stage and then we should assess the evidence. If the evidence is good enough, I fear that it is time to act.

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[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, this has been a very well informed debate. It is not to be unnecessarily partisan but rather to get my one party point out of the way first that I say that it has been a great strength to the Labour Party’s position that it has thought through many of the questions which have been posed for answer today. That was in effect set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, in opening from our Front Bench.

The speeches by the noble Lords, Lord Wright of Richmond and Lord Dannatt, reflected great diplomatic and military experience. It is perhaps not often recognised by people who have not been in the military that the logistics involved in anything that is being talked about are very considerable. If you do not have Brize Nortons scattered around the eastern Mediterranean, you have to get the stuff to Cyprus first and so on. It was with some incredulity that I kept reading that something was going to happen on Sunday, leaving aside the point, also made very tellingly, that the chemical weapons dumps are apparently spread around Syria and that to take them, or to do anything to make sure that they could not be used again, you would have to have thousands of boots on the ground. I ask the Minister to comment on that particular point in his reply. That rather suggests to me that that is probably true. We have a few days to reflect on where we are trying to get to. As the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, said, regime change is now not apparently our objective. If it is not, I do not quite follow the logic of some of the speeches that have been made.

I will pick one example from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who can correct me if I am wrong. Why, I ask myself, can we not arraign the President of Syria before the International Criminal Court and charge him with offences which, if proven, would cause him to spend the rest of his life in The Hague? I thought he meant by his argument that because that is very difficult we do not have to go through a process of jurisprudence. The noble Lord is a lawyer—I do not understand it. Who will take the President of Syria to the International Criminal Court, or does he not believe that we have a procedure other than a military one, which clearly is not a juridical procedure?

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

How does the noble Lord propose to get President Assad to the International Criminal Court physically?

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Indeed. The question about what we did in Yugoslavia, et cetera, comes up. The noble Lord is shaking his head as if to say, “Therefore we should assassinate him”. I am sorry—I have given way once, and the noble Lord did not give way to me.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

Justify your accusation.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am just putting the point that if we think that some surgical strike can stop his authority being exercised to do these things, why do we not make more of the procedure? If we think he is guilty of an offence under the chemical weapons convention, should we not give more thought to how we bring him before the International Criminal Court, and would that not be a productive way of engaging with the Russians, perhaps, as someone has suggested, with a conference of the parties signatory to the convention on chemical weapons?

The Foreign Secretary is fond of using a sort of metaphor in this debate that if the Security Council fails to do what we want—I think this is how the argument runs—we should ask what we call the international community to act. That has been said so many times. I ask the question: what, in this context, is the international community supposed to be if it is not just the less than 10% of the world who are our friends in this regard?