Asset Freezing (Compensation) Bill [HL]

Lord Rogan Excerpts

Friday 10th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rogan (UUP)]

My Lords, the primary duties of a Government are to protect the life and liberty of their citizens and to ensure that justice is available to all, without favour. Sadly, the partnership of terror between the Provisional Sinn Fein/IRA and Gaddafi’s Libya and the litany of death, destruction and misery which it inflicted on British citizens both in Ireland and on the mainland has exposed a disturbing failure of Government in these duties.

Gaddafi’s affections for Sinn Fein/IRA were deep rooted and well established. In 1973, the Irish Navy intercepted a vessel, the “Claudia”, with some five tonnes of weaponry supplied by Libya and bound for Sinn Fein/IRA. However, there were suspicions that three other shipments plus considerable amounts of cash did get through. More shipments came in the 1980s, spurred by Gaddafi’s admiration of Sinn Fein/IRA and his hatred of Britain. It has been argued that these shipments contained enough materiel to equip two infantry battalions. To put that in context, the British Army today has 47 infantry battalions, so the weapons that were sent by Gaddafi could supply 5% of the British infantry. The undetected shipments are alleged to have included heavy machine guns, handguns, rifles, surface-to-air missiles, and most potently and importantly, Semtex. Both the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, mentioned Semtex several times in their speeches and I will continue to do so. Another vessel, the “Eksund”, was famously intercepted in 1986 with a cargo that included two tonnes of Semtex, but nevertheless four similar shipments had already made it through.

Even as recently as February of this year dissident republican terrorists were boasting that they have more than a tonne of Semtex plastic explosive that escaped the decommissioning process and could now be used against mainland British targets. Provisional IRA veterans who disagreed with the peace process in Northern Ireland and who have experience of handling Semtex are among those who have access to the secret weapons dumps. They claim to have tested it and confirmed that it is still viable, even though it was smuggled to Ireland via Libya in the 1980s.

Semtex, which is both powerful and easy to conceal, gave new life to Sinn Fein/IRA’s terrorist campaign. The atrocities included the Poppy Day bombing at Enniskillen, a bomb at a fun run in Lisburn in 1988 which left six soldiers dead, the Ballygawley bus bombing, the Docklands bomb, the Hyde Park bomb and the Baltic Exchange bomb. It was also a Semtex bomb which murdered Ian Gow in the driveway of his constituency home in 1990.

With such a trail of misery, one would have expected that Her Majesty’s Government would strain every sinew and muscle to ensure that those who were injured and those who were left behind to pick up the pieces of their broken lives would be better and well looked after. One would have anticipated that, apart from seeking to prosecute those who had caused such carnage, the Government would be unfailing in their pursuit of Gaddafi, the paymaster and quartermaster of much of Sinn Fein/IRA’s terror. However, unfortunately that is not the impression that many victims have been left with.

Our American allies also suffered grievously at the hands of Gaddafi, especially through the Lockerbie bombing with the destruction of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 civilians on the ground in Scotland. The Americans certainly tried their best, securing £1 billion in compensation from the Libyan regime in 2003. The noble Lord, Lord Brennan, mentioned how the US obtained this compensation to help American citizens. However, one of the distasteful strings attached to the US deal with Libya was that Gaddafi’s payout would be a one-off and the regime would have immunity from future terrorism-related law suits. British claims were excluded from the settlement.

Concerns have also been raised that our former Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, helped broker this deal between the USA and Libya. One must therefore ask how strongly did Tony Blair, who was then a Middle East peace envoy, represent the interests of his fellow British citizens. It has become hard to get an answer to that question because Mr Blair has not had the time in his diary to attend the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee to address some of these vital points. Seemingly, he has not had too much time either to spend responding to written questions, as the committee has described his evidence as “superficial”. What of another British Prime Minister, Mr Gordon Brown? Mr Brown met with Gaddafi in 2009. Naturally enough, victims of Gaddafi’s Sinn Fein/IRA-backed terror were keen to hear what the Libyan dictator had to say on the matter when pressed by the Prime Minister. The response was that it would not be “appropriate” to formally raise the issue of compensation with Libya as it was an essential partner in the fight against terrorism.

We now have the manifestly unjust situation whereby the American victims of Sinn Fein/IRA’s Harrods bomb have received up to £6 million in compensation while the British victims of the same bomb have received nothing. The UK Government are currently sitting on frozen Libyan assets of £9.5 billion. I would like an assurance from the Minister that Her Majesty’s Government are doing everything they can to think creatively and positively about how to help the victims of Sinn Fein/IRA-Libyan terror. I certainly hope that there is some substance to the recent press speculation that the Government are seeking a £300 million slice of those funds.

However, given the length of time taken, some victims believe that there has been a dereliction of duty on the part of their Government, and I have to say that I sympathise with that view. For others time is pressing on and age is exacerbating the consequences of their injuries. Now is the time to act. Failure to do so would be to perpetuate and accentuate an injustice that has been inflicted on too many who have suffered too much already. For that and other reasons, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Empey, for bringing forward this timely Bill.