Landmines and Cluster Munitions

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Verdirame]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the announcement by NATO allies, including Baltic states and Poland, that they intend to withdraw from the Ottawa Treaty on anti-personnel landmines and the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank everyone who will be speaking today. No doubt we will hear a range of views. I am sure all of us would rather this debate had been prompted by new ratifications of these treaties, rather than withdrawals, and by a more reassuring security situation in Europe. But I trust we can all agree that it is not a lack of commitment to international law or to arms control that has led Poland, Finland and the Baltic states to announce their withdrawal from the Ottawa treaty and Lithuania to withdraw from the Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions. These are free, law-abiding, peace-loving nations led by mainstream political parties: centrist parties affiliated with the European People’s Party in Poland, Finland and Latvia, social democrats in Lithuania and the liberals in Estonia.

I co-authored the recent report by Policy Exchange on these developments. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Godson, for his intellectual leadership and Air Marshal Ed Stringer, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, for his invaluable expertise on defence matters. There is a question mark in the title of that report because I do not yet have firm answers to the questions we posed, but these questions are urgent and we need to hear what our Government’s thinking is.

On that note, in an Answer to a Written Question on this topic on Tuesday, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said the UK will continue

“to engage bilaterally on the actions States plan to take”.

Can the Minister tell us a bit more about the engagement that the Government have had so far with our five allies, following their announcement? Can she also tell us whether there has been any engagement with the French Government on this matter?

While our focus today is on the Ottawa treaty and the Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions, we must remember that other important treaties and arrangements for our security are in crisis. The 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe was suspended by Russia in 2007. In November 2023, Russia withdrew. Russia has also withdrawn from the open skies treaty. Russia has stopped all verification visits under the 2011 Vienna Document, a very important confidence and security-building instrument.

On the non-conventional front, the picture is also very concerning. Since 2018, NATO has declared Russia in breach of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The US withdrew in 2019, citing Russia’s continued non-compliance as a reason. In 2023, Russia rescinded its ratification—as it put it—of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.

Russia was never a party to the Ottawa treaty, although it was, and still is, a party to a pre-Ottawa treaty that regulates, but does not ban, the use of landmines. Everyone else in Europe, including Belarus, joined the Ottawa treaty. The Americans did not. The main reason they gave was the defence of South Korea, which has a land boundary of 240 kilometres with North Korea. South Korea has a very advanced military with an active personnel of 500,000 and the second-largest reserve army in the world at more than 3 million. There is a long-standing and significant American military presence in South Korea. Each of the five countries that announced its withdrawal from the Ottawa treaty has a longer land boundary with Russia and Belarus than South Korea has with North Korea. Their armed forces are considerably smaller than South Korea’s, and the Joint Expeditionary Force, which we lead, is also smaller than the US forces in the Korean peninsula. In that sense, it is not surprising that these European allies, in the much more challenging position they face, with Russia on the other side, have concluded that they too may need anti-personnel landmines for their defence.

At this point, the only NATO country sharing a border with Russia that has said it will not withdraw from Ottawa is Norway. Given where that boundary is—some 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle—Norway is simply not as vulnerable to a land invasion from Russia as the other five states.

Where do these developments leave Britain as a state party to the Ottawa treaty, committed, as we are, to the defence of our allies? The obligations under Article 1 are very far reaching. We cannot use anti-personnel landmines, retain them or transfer them directly or indirectly to anyone. Nor can we assist or encourage, in any way, anyone to use them. Section 2 of the Landmines Act 1998 creates various domestic law offences based on these provisions. If anti-personnel landmines become, for better or worse, an important part of the defensive strategy of front-line NATO states, do the Government believe that we can be as effective in defending them while we remain subject to these far-reaching obligations? Have we asked these allies what they think?

To justify our co-operation with them, we would have to rely on a declaration we made on ratification of the Ottawa treaty in 1998. This declaration says that the UK’s understanding is that

“mere participation in the planning or execution of operations”

with non-state parties that use anti-personnel landmines is not a form of assistance prohibited under the treaty. But we are more than mere participants; we are the lead nation of the Joint Expeditionary Force, and therefore the NATO country that would have to lead in the defence of Estonia. Do the Government consider that this unilateral declaration remains fit for purpose in the current situation, and that it would survive legal challenge?

The Cluster Munitions Convention was concluded 10 years after the Ottawa treaty. By then, Russia’s neighbours were becoming nervous. Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Ukraine, Turkey and, of course, the United States all stayed out. The one country that went in is Lithuania, but it has now withdrawn. Unlike the Ottawa treaty, the Cluster Munitions Convention does have a provision, Article 21(3), that expressly permits state parties to

“engage in military … operations with States not party to this Convention that might engage in activities prohibited to a State Party”.

The then Defence Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, who I know intended to speak today, would have reminded us that this was a key provision from a UK perspective, because it meant we could still operate with the Americans and rely on them, but is it sufficient now?

The Prime Minister, who must be congratulated on his leadership throughout this crisis, has said that the Europeans must now be ready to do the “heavy lifting”. He said, rightly, that ours is

“an era where peace … depends upon strength and deterrence”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/3/25; col. 25.]

If that is so, can Europe’s two main military powers—the UK and France—really afford to deprive themselves of this capability? Let us not forget that both the Ottawa treaty and the Oslo convention provide that if the withdrawing state is engaged in an armed conflict, the withdrawal will take effect only after the end of the armed conflict. Ukraine, for example, remains bound by the Ottawa treaty until the end of its conflict with Russia, even though Russia is not a party. So this rule applies even if one party is the victim of unprovoked aggression by a non-party.

We must therefore consider now the impact on our potential deployment in Ukraine. The purpose of such deployment would be to deter—or to dissuade, as President Macron put it—further Russian aggression. Cluster munitions and anti-personnel landmines have been used widely by both parties in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict. I have read no analysis that suggests that you could be an effective belligerent in that theatre without these capabilities. Indeed, one of the last decisions of the Biden Administration was to supply Ukraine with anti-personnel landmines because, as the then US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin put it, Russia had changed its tactics and so Ukraine needed them.

Would it be wise to deploy British troops without equipping them with the capabilities that—according to the Americans, the Ukrainians and other front-line NATO allies—are necessary in that very theatre? If we did, would such a deployment have the credibility that effective deterrence requires? In a widely reported speech last month, Prime Minister Tusk said that Poland must achieve “the most modern capabilities”, even in

“nuclear weapons and modern non-conventional weapons”.

That is an alarming statement, and we must consider how best to respond to the concerns that prompted it. Is this not the time to provide Poland and other allies with maximum reassurance on the conventional front to lower any incentive they might have to explore the acquisition of non-conventional weapons? How can we reassure them effectively if we are not prepared to consider reacquiring conventional capabilities that under previous assumptions we thought we could dispense with but that have turned out to be necessary?

We cannot avoid conventional rearmament in Europe, but we cannot afford—and may still have time to prevent—non-conventional proliferation. If we are too cautious on the conventional weapons front, we might miss an opportunity to defuse a far more terrifying arms race. As the Prime Minister said, we face tough decisions—and this might be one of them.