Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I appreciate the broader context set by the right reverend Prelate. In supporting the Bill, so eloquently moved by my noble friend Lord Dubs, I recognise that, as a civilian who has never borne arms, I am questioning a decision made on the advice of military professionals. On the whole, civilians should be careful about that. But it is precisely because civilians—people who have nothing to do with battles and only want to harvest their crops and go about their day-to-day business—are so overwhelmingly affected by cluster bombs that I do speak. Cluster bombs have been used in most major conflicts since the Vietnam War. In Laos, where I saw children on crutches and legless adults propelling themselves on small wagons to beg, there were nearly 5,000 casualties from them. In Iraq, there have been more than 2,000. Handicap International estimates that there may be 100,000 casualties worldwide and that 98 per cent of them are probably civilian. In Kosovo and Cambodia, where I saw many victims, boys under 18 are the biggest single casualty group. The UK is one of the larger users of cluster bombs. Unexploded ones are still being found in Kosovo from the 78,000 submunitions inside cluster bombs. There were dropped, in our name, more than 100,000 submunitions inside cluster bombs during the invasion of Iraq, but I am not aware of our Government having made any analysis of their own of the harm to civilians caused by the use of these weapons. Yet the concept of banning weapons that cause unnecessary suffering to civilians is firmly embedded in the law that we adhere to, the Convention on Conventional Weapons. According to a YouGov poll, 81 per cent of British adults agree that the UK should support an international ban on cluster bombs. It seems to me that the Government have a case to answer. I regret that the department for which my noble friend speaks has not seen fit to accept this case. In a Written Statement published in Hansard on 4 December, my noble friend Lord Triesman repeated what my honourable friend Kim Howells said: that the UK would begin a process of withdrawing just one kind of cluster bomb, so-called dumb cluster bombs—a term which the noble Lord, Lord Garden, questioned in his supplementary question of 23 November. We all agree that this small advance is, of course, welcome, but the Statement says of cluster bombs that, "““compelling and legitimate conditions may occur when our Armed Forces need to use these weapons””.—[Official Report, 4/12/06; WS 111.]" That is a bad precondition under which to start the reviews and the discussions which the Statement expands on. Apparently, on 14 November, UK representatives had already objected—we were the only member state to do so—to a proposal for EU government experts to prepare a common EU position on negotiating a new legal instrument on these weapons. If the Government pay little attention to the thousands upon thousands of dead and disabled civilians, many of them children, can we at least not join our allies and friends among other sovereign states? We have heard that Belgium has banned cluster bombs. New Zealand has called for a legally binding instrument, and the Lebanon, whose suffering we heard about from my noble friend and from the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, has joined the call for a ban. Then there are all those who have called for negotiations to begin without further postponements. Such decisions should indeed be joint ones. I think all sides of this House have supported multilateral action on a ban. My noble friend’s Bill would lead the implementation of such an international ban. There is, in fact, no need to work up all those long-term discussions and reviews held out by the Government through the framework of the Convention on Conventional Weapons. In the 1990s, states departed from the framework of the CCW to negotiate the Ottawa treaty to ban landmines, in which the UK, in those days, took an active part. The Ottawa convention now has 152 states parties, as against the CCW’s 100, and the only country left now using anti-personnel landmines is Burma. The Ottawa action would be a good model to follow. It is political will that we are short of here, not lengthy processes. I do not say this with any satisfaction, but should we not be ashamed to stand apart from a gathering momentum of public and international opinion on this of all subjects, when we could be helping to lead it?