Asset Freezing (Compensation) Bill [HL]

Lord Rogan Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard) : House of Lords
Friday 27th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rogan (UUP)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Empey and his Bill, which seeks to release these frozen assets. As has been said, the Gaddafi regime supplied the IRA with weaponry in the early 1970s and in the mid-1980s. The quantities were vast and, as a result, the IRA was able to escalate its campaign of violence. As part of these shipments, in the early 1980s the IRA acquired supplies of Czech-made Semtex from Libya. According to the journalist Toby Harnden, from late 1986 to 2011,

“virtually every bomb constructed by the Provisional IRA”,

and splinter groups such as the Real IRA,

“has contained Semtex from a Libyan shipment unloaded at an Irish pier in 1986”.

As someone who lived in Northern Ireland through that period, it is sobering to think that so much of the death and destruction unleashed on our streets came from one source—Libya. The biggest arms shipment arrived on a beach in County Wicklow in late 1986 and consisted of 80 tonnes of weaponry, including seven rocket-propelled grenades, 10 surface-to-air missiles and a tonne of Semtex plastic explosive. That shipment was the fourth landed in a 14-month period and would transform the IRA’s ability to conduct its terrorist campaign. Untold suffering was caused by the weapons supplied by Gaddafi. The dead are mourned to this day, and many more still carry the physical and mental scars inflicted by murderous terrorists at the behest of a tyrant.

It is little short of a national scandal that British victims of Gaddafi’s weaponry should be reduced to virtually begging their Government for justice. As a result of Lockerbie and other terrorist outrages, the Americans, Germans and French all secured compensation for their citizens who suffered as a result of Libyan-supplied weaponry. That situation merely highlights all the more starkly the failure of successive British Governments to secure similar deals for our citizens. Why should our people be less favourably treated than American, French and German citizens? Surely British Governments—of whatever political complexion—should be standing up for the rights and interests of British citizens.

Suspicions have been raised that, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister and Libya was being brought in from the cold, a secret deal was done whereby the UK would not pursue compensation. It has also been suggested that the desire to secure oil took precedence over the need to secure a measure of justice and compensation for victims. Of course, this is not the only secret deal which Mr Blair has been associated with when it comes to Northern Ireland. Noble Lords will recall the shameful on-the-run letters of comfort, which were distributed to more than 200 republican terrorist suspects, and which are effectively “stay out of jail free” cards. These items were part of a secret deal between Tony Blair and Sinn Fein/IRA. The fact that many were handed out by Gerry Kelly—a man convicted of bombing the Old Bailey in March 1973—merely compounds the insult to the victims.

My noble friend Lord Empey has been tenacious in his pursuit of this issue and he deserves a great deal of credit for his efforts to raise the profile of the Libyan connection to terrorism and to ensure that victims can see that Parliament has not forgotten them and is still seeking a measure of justice for them. As he said, he has been writing to the UK Government about Gaddafi and Libya since 2002. In all those years, he has never heard a coherent explanation for the failure of Her Majesty’s Government to get compensation for UK citizens for all the damage that Gaddafi did as a result of supplying the IRA with weapons, money and training for over 20 years.

Last year he brought a Private Member’s Bill before Parliament but, unfortunately, it ran out of time. He has now reintroduced it and has my wholehearted support. Quite simply, the average person in the street will find it incomprehensible that Libya has £9.5 billion in frozen assets in London alone. Is it not reasonable to want some of that to go towards helping the many who have suffered greatly as a result of Gaddafi’s Semtex and other weaponry, which was placed into the hands of terrorists and psychopaths? In all the talk of rights, the great and the good seem to be excessively reluctant to lift a finger to help people who suffered terribly as a result of this. Many of the events took place over 30 years ago and time is running out for the victims. Soothing words from the Government and officialdom are simply not enough. We must persevere to raise the profile of this issue and continue to seek justice for the individual victims and the UK as a whole for the huge damage done by Gaddafi. For me this is about fairness and justice. It is about doing the right thing. Once again, I commend my noble friend Lord Empey for his determined effort in this regard and I assure him and the House that he has my and the Ulster Unionist Party’s full support.