Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Soames of Fletching Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

We can take many steps. First, 34 countries of the Commonwealth—and 137 countries in the world as a whole—have now signed the declaration. I spoke last night to the diplomatic corps here and said that now that only a minority of countries in the world have not signed our declaration on sexual violence, it is time for them to get on with it and not be left out of that work. Of course, Sri Lanka is one of the hardest countries to convince about that, for instance because one of the provisions of our declaration is that there will be no amnesty in peace agreements for crimes of sexual violence and that there will be real accountability for what happened in the past. It is easy to see why the Sri Lankan Government do not want to embrace those issues, but we will keep on raising them with them.

[Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

May I congratulate my right hon. Friend on taking important steps towards dealing with this vile problem? Does he agree that it may be necessary to amend the Geneva convention to deal with these problems, and will he look at what can be done through the convention?

[Mr Hague]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. So far, we have agreed among the G8 nations and the 137 nations that have now signed the declaration that I put forward that crimes of sexual violence in conflict are grave breaches of the Geneva conventions and their first protocol. That does not require us to change the Geneva conventions, but it does require us to get the whole world to recognise that those crimes are breaches of the Geneva conventions in any case and should be part of the rules of warfare that the whole world should accept for the future.