Mali: UN Peacekeeping Mission

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I am not sure that it is possible to give a specific response to my noble friend’s question; reverting to the Accra initiative, I think a great deal of discussion has to be had as to how we take forward a concerted desire to support these west African states, with a mixture of military intervention—or military support rather—if that is required, and advice and support for the political or economic regimes. A number of factors have to be taken into account. Mali is, of course, an observer member of the Accra initiative along with Niger. In total, the initiative represents a very healthy and promising group of countries. One of the strategic challenges to be hammered out is just what my noble friend referred to: at the end of the day, what is it that the African states are looking for, and what can we do to support that endeavour?

I am not being evasive; it is just that I think a great deal more discussion has to ensue before clarity begins to emerge about some of these strategic objectives. My noble friend will be aware that we already do a lot in west Africa. We provide support in Nigeria and in the Chad basin, we are supporting the armed forces of Cameroon and we are working closely with the Ghanaian armed forces to develop ongoing counterterrorism training packages. At the end of the day, the threat of terrorism in the Sahel has not disappeared; it is there. Sadly, the presence of Wagner is likely to exacerbate the situation rather than facilitate solutions; that is another important component of everything that has to be discussed.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, while joining those paying tribute to the work that our peacekeepers have done in what is obviously an extremely challenging and difficult mission, I have two questions for the Minister. First, did we have any consultations with the UN’s department of peacekeeping operations before the announcement that the Minister and her colleague in the other place have made—and, if so, how did it respond to our intention to withdraw? Secondly, can she say what number of UN peacekeepers we will have deployed after this withdrawal has taken place?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

On the first question, I am not privy to what discussions took place. I shall make inquiries and respond to the noble Lord with more details if I am able to do so. As to the second point, I do not have specific information but, again, I will undertake to investigate and if I can provide more detail, I shall.

Ukraine

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, one of my first professional involvements with Ukraine was in 1994 when, as Britain’s Permanent Representative to the UN, I was instructed, along with my Russian and US colleagues, as co-depositories of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to transmit to the UN the Budapest memorandum, certifying it as a formal international agreement. The memorandum guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in return for handing over all the nuclear warheads and missiles that the Soviet Union had left behind. My Russian colleague was one Sergei Lavrov. I hope that touches his conscience—it certainly should do—but I rather doubt whether it does.

We need to realise, I believe, that the events of the last few days have triggered a second Cold War. Like the first, it will probably last quite a long time and impose costs on ourselves as well as others. It will be a necessary response to a war of choice, a war of aggression, and therefore a war crime.

How, in practical terms, should we react? We should surely give no international legitimacy to any puppet Government the Russians may try to install, nor to the Governments of the five illegal statelets they have installed in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine by the use of force. The elected Government of President Zelensky should remain our interlocutor and the holder of Ukraine’s UN seat.

On further sanctions, I hope that excluding Russia from the SWIFT payment system will figure. It is a pity we are not at the European Council table, or in the room at least, to advocate for that. Do we not, too, need to consider recreating something like the CoCom international system on strategic exports? Should we not also consider reviving in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office what used to be called the information research department to deal with disinformation and to undermine the false narrative being put about by the Kremlin, RT and trolls on social media? I very much welcomed the emphasis the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, gave to that issue in his remarkable maiden speech. Then there is the economic crime Bill, still to appear; surely that needs to go on to the statue book in this Session of Parliament and not the next one. Of course, Ukrainians will need all the humanitarian help we can give them, and Ukrainian asylum seekers must, and I hope will, be treated rapidly and sympathetically.

The Russians have thrown down the gauntlet against the European security order they themselves helped to create in 1990. We will need to respond to that challenge with patience and determination by boosting the defences of NATO allies most exposed to pressure; by recognising that the European region is now a higher priority for us than the Indo-Pacific region; and by keeping in lockstep with the US, our other NATO partners and the EU itself, which is already playing a key role over sanctions.

Yesterday was a grim day for all Europeans. But we rose successfully to the challenge after the Second World War, and we should be able to do so again now. It is our own security that is at stake.

Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information Agreement

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I should at the outset make it clear that I welcome the agreement by the US and the UK to make naval nuclear propulsion information available to Australia, one of our oldest and most valuable allies. A step such as this, which will substantially enhance the deterrent capacity of an ally in a sensitive and strategically important region of the world where tensions and challenges are on the rise, makes good sense. When the dust has settled, one hopes that all western allies that have a stake in the security of Indo-Pacific region—including France, however much it was justifiably affronted by the way the announcement of this agreement was handled—will recognise that we all collectively have much to gain from Australia’s increased naval capability.

As to the announcement of the agreement, there, I am afraid, the positive tone changes. That was a travesty of diplomacy. In future years, I suspect this episode will be taught at diplomatic academies across the world as how quite unnecessarily to lose both friends and influence. Why did the Prime Minister think it was sensible to rub salt in French wounds by insulting President Macron with some ill-chosen Franglais, in sharp contrast to President Biden’s willingness to offer an apology and seek to put hard feeling behind us? Are we so pre-eminent in world affairs that we can hope to get away unscathed with that kind of performance? Perhaps the Minister can use the opportunity of replying to this debate to match President Biden’s example. I would greatly welcome it if she did.

Some important questions remain to be answered about the agreement, and I hope the Minister will be able to respond to them. Here are three. First, is this agreement in no sense a defence pact or treaty with objectives and obligations similar to those in the Atlantic alliance? I ask that because a great deal of the press comment has been extraordinarily wide of the mark, as I understand it. The words “pact”, “mutual defence treaty” and so on are thrown around, and it would be a great help if the Minister could correct that—if I am right in thinking that it needs correcting. I hope the answer is no, since I do not think that this is the moment to revive those Cold War relics SEATO and CENTO. To do so would risk opening up rifts in what we must hope will be the widest possible involvement of countries in the Indo-Pacific region, working together to deter any possible Chinese attempt to extend its sphere of influence. I doubt very much whether India, Japan, South Korea or even New Zealand would contemplate joining such a mutual defence organisation, and we surely do not want to slip into new a Cold War mentality when the solution of so many of the world’s problems, such as those relating to climate change, health, trade and nuclear non-proliferation, necessitate working with China.

Secondly, will Australia, a non-nuclear member state under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, be negotiating suitable safeguards with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that there are no proliferation risks from this exchange of information? Will that be a condition of supply?

Thirdly, would it be preferable if any technology transfer to Australia—here I speak about something that, I imagine, might not take place for some time, while design and competition between us and the United States take places—takes the form of propulsion units that will not require replenishment during the life of the submarine in question? That would thus avoid the greatest risk of fissionable material, in the form of high enriched uranium, getting into the wrong hands. It would be very useful if the noble Baroness addressed those three questions. I hope her replies strengthen my welcome for this agreement.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the Government have rightly considered the preservation and strengthening of the rules-based international order to be in the vital national interest of the UK. This is the thrust of the recent integrated review. Britain outside the EU needs these rules even more than before, when we could rely on the solidarity of our European neighbours as of right.

This rules-based order has just had a pretty narrow squeak. Another four years of President Trump’s disruptive policies towards it could have inflicted irreparable damage. Although it is welcome that the US is back, the Biden Administration have no magic wand. Britain, too, and other like-minded states around the world will need to play their role in repairing the damage, filling the gaps and reforming international institutions. This is not so much about drawing up some new overall grand design as about acting collectively where the needs are greatest—on health, trade, climate change, and on reducing the risks of nuclear war and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

On health, as the world gradually emerges from the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, it will be important to put the Clark-Johnson Sirleaf review of the World Health Organization to good use to ensure that the WHO and its members get more prompt and guaranteed access to new outbreaks of disease. The WHO must be provided with a higher proportion of the resources it needs by assured, assessed—not just voluntary—contributions to bring about a much closer working relationship between the global organisations which deal respectively with human and animal diseases. Global schemes such as Gavi and COVAX must be in better working order and better resourced for when the next pandemic comes along, as it surely will. The provision of vaccines to poorer countries must be achieved more effectively when the need arises.

The World Trade Organization, under its new, impressive director-general, is also in need of urgent repair. Its dispute settlement procedures should be brought back into full working order. A waiver on the system of trade-related patents for Covid vaccines should be agreed promptly. Its decision-making processes need to be less ponderous and less easy to block—perhaps by making more use of plurilateral agreements in areas such as digital trade and trade in services. The balance between bilateral and multilateral trade agreements needs careful watching, avoiding too much emphasis on the former at the expense of the latter.

Climate change is a short, medium and long-term challenge which requires both national and collective responses, as the two are closely linked. Paris was an achievement, but it has not stopped the world slipping in the wrong direction. Glasgow will need to do better. It will need to reverse the rise in the use of fossil fuels —coal in particular. If we are to persuade big coal users, such as China and India, to do this, we cannot do the opposite ourselves. Many developing countries will need help to fulfil the commitments they enter into. This will require substantial amounts of public and private finance.

The postponed nuclear non-proliferation review conference is now scheduled for later this year. It comes after a period of steady erosion of arms control measures between the nuclear weapon states. If that erosion is to be reversed and dialogue about strategic stability between the five recognised weapon states is to get under way—as it needs to do—we cannot simply set off in the opposite direction, increasing our stockpile of warheads and refusing even to discuss concepts such as sole purpose and no first use. We cannot do that without it having negative consequences and inhibiting our ability to reduce the risks of nuclear war.

The Government’s decision to reduce our aid spending from 0.7% of our GNI, as laid down in law, to 0.5% is inconsistent with our taking effective action to address any of the four sectors of the rules-based international order to which I have referred. I urge the Minister in replying to this debate to give a clear commitment that the Government will return to full compliance with 0.7% in the fiscal year following the resumption of growth in our economy. This would do something to repair the damage already done and to restore our ability to play a positive role in strengthening the rules- based international order.

Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 13th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 3 and have added my name to it. I have the advantage of having heard the last two contributions to this debate, which is, to some extent, a rehearsal of that which we held in Committee. I will take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, on one point—I have often known him to be hopeful but never naive.

I am tempted to adopt a speech that I made in Committee and sit down, but I will not do that because, like those who have spoken already, I do not understand the intransigence of this Government. I do not recall any noble Lord, other than the noble Baroness herself, making any speech in favour of the Government’s position either at Second Reading or in Committee. How much does it take? How much evidence is necessary to persuade this Government to change their mind?

Of course, we have heard the weight and the quality of the evidence of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, with his extensive experience. We heard, essentially, the forensic destruction of the government case, line by line, by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, in Committee, and we continue to hear the well-known and, one might think, well-informed opposition of Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank and General Sir Nick Parker. Some of these have been mentioned already, but no one has mentioned Elizabeth Wilmshurst —that most courageous opponent of the legality of military action against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, who resigned from her position in the Foreign Office—and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who has been both Secretary of State for Defence and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. How is it that, in the face of the mounting volume of evidence against them, the Government insist on holding to this position? I fail to understand.

In Committee, I quoted from the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. At that stage, its approach to this was to provide an executive summary, in the course of which it said that

“murder, torture and other grave war crimes face substantial legal barriers before there can be a prosecution … The Bill undermines our obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture”.

Again, I ask: what further evidence is required to persuade the Government that they are in the wrong place? Since then, the Bingham centre has produced a more detailed analysis of this proposed legislation. If your Lordships wish to see it reinforce what it has previously said, you will find that on page 16 of that analysis.

What do we know now? The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has made pretty clear a view that might result in a British citizen, a member of the British Armed Forces, possibly being taken to the International Criminal Court—can you imagine it? This country takes pride in our being advocates for the rules-based order in the face of other countries that simply want to ignore it or toss it aside.

I refer to the interests of the United Nations and the official responsible for human rights. Can you imagine the embarrassment of a prominent member of the Security Council asserting the rules-based order, in the teeth of Russian and Chinese unwillingness? I would love to know what the permanent representative of the British mission at the United Nations thinks about the position now being adopted.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. To plagiarise Lewis Carroll, laws mean what we want them to mean. That is certainly the position that was adopted when we came to Part 5 of the Internal Market Bill. What does this do for our standing and influence? How can we make those who breach international law understand the consequences of what they are doing if we are, on the face of it, doing exactly the same ourselves?

I have some sympathy for the noble Baroness because she has gallantly sought to defend the Government’s position. However, I finish by offering her some advice: Oliver Cromwell, in a substantial disagreement with the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, wrote on 3 August 1650—the language is perhaps of its time:

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”


The language may no longer be appropriate, but the sentiment is surely something to which she should give effect.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB) [V]]

I wish to speak briefly in support of Amendment 3 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, and others. I say at the outset that I will not be able to match the eloquence of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, who preceded me and whose views I totally share.

I speak in support of this amendment, as I did in Committee, on the grounds of both principle and pragmatism. The arguments of principle that underpin this amendment are clear. Unamended, the Bill would effectively—de facto if not de jure—open the door to a time limitation on the inquiry into and, where justified, the prosecution of the most heinous of crimes set out in the Rome statute, establishing the International Criminal Court—war crimes and genocide—and those set out in the convention against torture.

I say gently to the Minister that I was a bit disappointed that, in one of her replies to earlier amendments, she suggested that the suggestion that this was a de facto limitation was quite wrong. I question what she said then because if it is not a de facto limitation, what on earth is the point of the Bill? I really do not understand it. I happen to support the main thrust of the Bill.

Neither the Rome statute nor the torture convention provides for any such time limitation on the crimes covered by them, nor in my view should they do so for crimes of that extraordinary seriousness. I suggest that to allow such a limitation into our domestic legislation is not consistent with this Parliament’s ratification of the Rome statute and of our acceptance of the jurisdiction of the ICC. At a time when there is so much evidence worldwide of these sorts of crimes being committed—the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has spoken movingly about them—we should not be playing fast and loose with our own obligations to inquire into them and to prosecute.

The arguments of pragmatism are equally compelling. Unamended, the Bill will actually increase, not decrease, the chances of British service personnel falling within the purview of the ICC. We know that because we have been explicitly warned of it by the court’s prosecutor, who has hitherto relied on our willingness to prosecute crimes under the Rome statute as a sufficient reason not to pursue such cases through the ICC machinery. If that commitment were in any way removed or questioned, the chances of action by the ICC would sharply increase. I was glad to hear the Minister, in responding to earlier amendments, recognise that that risk really exists. It would be a supreme and shameful irony if action by the ICC had to be taken by the recently appointed ICC prosecutor, a British national.

I hope that the House will amend the Bill in the sense proposed to remove from it any limitations of time for crimes set out in the Rome statute and the torture convention and will do so without in any way calling into question the original objective of the Bill: to lift the shadow of vexatious inquiries and prosecutions for lesser offences from our service personnel.

[Baroness Blower (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick. I support Amendment 3. As your Lordships may know, I have no legal or military experience and therefore enter this debate today as someone who has listened to and participated in all previous stages of the Bill, and has been powerfully persuaded that my own concerns about the Bill at the outset were rightly felt.

As did the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, I shall quote from the conclusion of the recent executive summary of the briefing from the Bingham Centre:

“The UK has a long and proud reputation of decisive action against war crimes. This Bill weakens that reputation. It makes it harder, not easier to stamp out abuses that our own troops have committed. We do not protect British troops and British values by hiding from the truth or acting with impunity.”


Although it invokes “British values”, surely these are international values, based on the international rule of law.

The UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, quoted previously by my noble friend Lord Robertson, this week urged the UK Government to heed the warnings that the Bill in its current form risks undermining the human rights obligations that the UK has committed itself to respecting. As a former teacher, when people make a commitment to respect something, I expect them to follow through.

The UN press release says:

“In its present form, the proposed legislation raises substantial questions about the UK’s future compliance with its international obligations, particularly under the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment … as well as the … Geneva Conventions. These include obligations to prevent, investigate and prosecute acts such as torture and unlawful killing, and make no distinction as to when the offences were committed … ‘The prohibition of torture in international law is both clear and absolute,’ Bachelet said. ‘Article 2 of the Convention against Torture is unequivocal, stating that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”’ The obligations in the Convention to investigate and prosecute such allegations recognize none of the new distinctions that the Bill would now bring into law.”


Surely that is a reason for amendment.

Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard
Tuesday 9th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 14 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Robertson, Lord Alton, Lord West and Lord Campbell, and Amendment 36 in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead. In doing so, I apologise for not having spoken on Second Reading, due to an inadvertent mistake over timing.

I back the amendments not out of any objection to the Bill as a whole. The Bill’s objectives are laudable ones of giving protection to our service personnel against vexatious inquiries and prosecutions. However, the Bill as drafted actually increases those risks rather than reduces them. I oppose these defects, which the amendments seek to remedy on the grounds of both practicality and principle. The practical problem is a very obvious one. While the Bill places limitations in time in our domestic law on the pursuit of inquiries and prosecutions, it does not and cannot impose such limitations with respect to our international obligations under the Rome statute, which established the International Criminal Court and which Parliament ratified and gave effect to before its entry into force. The Rome statute, in whose negotiation we participated fully—I was myself involved to a modest extent when I was the UK’s Permanent Representative to the UN in 1995—contains no such limitations with respect to the crimes identified in the statute. The risk is therefore, as many other noble Lords have said, that our service personnel could be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court even though we had declined, under the provisions of this Bill, to take any action.

That is no theoretical risk. Quite recently, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court decided not to pursue cases against our personnel on the explicit grounds that we had domestic legislation to deal with the alleged offences and had demonstrated our willingness to use it. This could therefore be a case, I fear, of being out of the frying pan and into the fire if we do not take steps to remove from the scope of the Bill the extraordinarily serious offences set out in the Rome statute.

The argument of principle in favour of these amendments leads on from the practical argument. The International Criminal Court is an important part of that rules-based international system which the Government have argued, quite correctly in my view, that it is in our national interest to sustain. In recent years, the Government have done a good job in doing precisely that against the intemperate onslaughts of the Trump Administration against the International Criminal Court. Here, however, we are being asked to legislate in a way that could put us in contradiction with our obligations under the Rome statute. That clearly is not a sensible or principled thing to do. At worst, it could lead to British service personnel being prosecuted unnecessarily in the ICC, which would inevitably lead to an outcry in this country, possibly challenging the basis of our membership. Less dramatically, it will be seen by the critics and opponents of the International Criminal Court around the world—in places like Russia and China, and the US in some parts of the body politic—as a weakening of our support of the court and as undermining its authority. For both the reasons of practicality and principle, I hope that the Government will, before we get to Report, reconsider these flawed aspects of the Bill and remedy them.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I doubt that many people would dispute that Britain’s foreign policy—its role in the world—played only a minimal part in the recent general election and figured only marginally in the Queen’s Speech we are debating today, so this is surely a moment when we need to address those issues. This is all the more necessary because we are living through a period of considerable turmoil and disruption, some of it caused by our closest ally, the United States, and we will be embarking on these troubled waters in our new post-Brexit capacity, with less ability to influence policy developments in both Brussels and Washington than we had in the past. Power relationships are shifting, often in ways that do not favour us and our allies and friends. The framework of the rules-based international order, which we ourselves did so much to create over the past 75 years, is being challenged and shaken to its foundations.

During 2020 we will participate in four important international gatherings which will do much to shape the world we live in, for better or for worse, and determine our collective response to some of the main global challenges we face. These four are the nuclear non-proliferation treaty’s quinquennial review in May, which is incidentally the treaty’s 50th anniversary; the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Kazakhstan in the summer; the stocktaking on the UN’s sustainable development goals, five years into their 15-year span, in the autumn; and, at the end of the year, the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow on climate change.

The background to the NPT review conference in May is certainly not encouraging. The risks of nuclear war, whether by accident or design, are on the rise; the golden era, from the end of the Cold War in the 1980s until about 2015, when we felt able to discount any chance of nuclear war, has ended; arms control agreements are eroding, with the INF gone and New START, limiting Russian and US strategic weapons, needing renewal next year; and the NPT itself, a cornerstone of international peace and security, is living dangerously, with challenges from North Korea and Iran. How best can the world be moved back on to a path of incremental disarmament and arms control? Can a dialogue on strategic stability between the world’s principal nuclear weapons states, such as existed even at the height of the Cold War, be resumed? Can nuclear weapons states’ military doctrines be made more transparent? Can it be stated again that a nuclear war must not be fought and cannot be won? All these and more questions need to be addressed. I would like to hear how the Government plan to address them during our current rotating chairmanship of the P5 recognised nuclear weapon states, and in New York in May.

On the second event, world trade, for so long an engine of global economic growth, is in the doldrums, disrupted by trade wars, by the unilateral flouting of international rules and by the paralysis of the WTO’s dispute settlement procedures as a result of the US refusal to allow the appointment of new panellists. No part of the rules-based international order is under greater and more immediate threat than the WTO. What plans do the Government have to reverse that trend and to circumvent the paralysis of dispute settlement procedures if the US cannot be persuaded to relent? What prospects are there for plurilateral agreements on trade in services and on digital exchanges, on which so much of our economy now depends? A ministerial answer to these questions would be welcome.

On the sustainable development goals, it would be good to hear how the Government intend to put to good use our leadership role due to the commitment we have made to 0.7% of GNI. How do they see the main thrusts of that expenditure being developed? What are the main shortfalls in the SDGs which need to be remedied this coming autumn, and how will the Government set about doing it?

The task facing COP 26 in Glasgow is a formidable one, whose daunting nature has been underlined by the relative failure of COP 25 in Madrid last month, and it will have to be done without any help at all from our principal ally, the US. It will require advocacy and diplomacy at the highest political level, as was deployed by France when the Paris agreement was put together some years ago. It will also require us to set an example—in actions, not just in words—with our own domestic environmental policies. All the diplomatic advocacy we deploy in the run-up to Glasgow will count for little if we are not putting our money where our mouth is. It would be good to hear something of that in the Government’s plans.

All that is to come in 2020, as well as the 75th anniversary of the UN’s founding. How well we rise to these four challenges will certainly test the claims the Government have made that Brexit will enhance and not diminish our influence in the world. We shall see. That we need to address them with seriousness and determination is surely not in doubt.