International Tribunals (Sierra Leone) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this Second Reading debate. It has been constructive, and I welcome the wide support for the United Kingdom continuing to play its leading role in strengthening international justice and seeing through our pledges to Sierra Leone. As I said, the Bill supports, through practical action, two of our foreign policy priorities: ensuring that those accused of serious crimes of international concern face justice; and preventing and resolving conflict through strong international systems. Let me do my best to address the points that noble Lords have made. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for his assessment. He is quite right that this is a fundamental shift in delineating our international responsibilities on issues of this kind. I understand his point, and he is quite right to say that he first made it some time ago about Iraq, but I can say only that the strong view of the Government of Iraq was that the trial of Saddam Hussein and others should take place in the context of their national law and their new national institutions. They expressed that very forcefully. Here we are dealing with a case being tried in part under local but principally under international law. On hybrid tribunals as a whole, including thatfor Cambodia, overall my assessment is that mixed national and international courts—that is the distinction that I am making with Iraq—have been a success. This special court has behaved impressively and has worked well under difficult conditions. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said, in the course of the trial from 4 June I expect it to continue to do so. Certainly so far it has proved less costly than either the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda tribunals, andits excellent outreach programme means that it is perceived as being accessible and relevant to the people of Sierra Leone. Incidentally, a great deal of work has been done with journalists through the BBC World Service Trust to make sure that there is constant information to underpin the point that this is not a remote activity. In Cambodia, the trials in the extraordinary court, better known as the Khmer Rouge tribunal, have not yet started, so it is not possible to say how many individuals will face trial or be convicted. None the less, our expectation is that any sentences givento those who are convicted will be terms of imprisonment served in Cambodia. I can also say that it is absolutely not our intention to imprison any individuals convicted in that trial. In other answers, I shall come back to the issue of burden sharing in general. My noble friend Lord Anderson and the noble Lord, Lord Howell, rightly made the point that other indictees could be covered by this Bill. As I said in my opening speech, at the moment we have no expectation that that will be the case. But I want to make the point that it does not totally exclude the possibility. Indeed, if we had named Charles Taylor, we would have been right in the territory of hybrid Bills and thus in all the difficulties that such Bills can create. I can confirm completely that this is not a hybrid Bill. I shall respond in the following terms to the other questions put to me by my noble friend Lord Anderson and others. It is true to say that the International Criminal Court could not try Taylor because it has jurisdiction only in respect of crimes committed after the Rome statute entered into force on 1 July 2002, whereas the special court covers crimes committed since 30 November 1996. That is the accurate position, as I can confirm for the noble Lord, Lord Howell, as well. I hope that nothing that I said in my opening speech has added to the confusion; that was not my intention. My noble friend Lord Anderson also asked whether the United Kingdom might take prisoners other than Taylor, and I hope that I have responded to that in relation to what he and the noble Lord, Lord Howell, have putto me. My noble friend rightly noted that, despite the positive effects of the quite remarkable intervention in Sierra Leone by our paratroopers in 2000, the troubles in the country are not over. I shall say a little about what we are doing to assist in a more general sense. We certainly have assisted in the movement towards an election and I am pleased to note that,in this context, more support will be provided throughout the election process. It is helpful that the president has decided not to try to change the constitution and run for a third term. I share completely that view. Work needs to be done on corruption and certainly on diamonds, although good progress has been made in the area generally. I was delighted that Liberia was given permission to resume trade for a period, after which there will be another assessment. Progress is being made in the region. As I have said, we are working to see credible elections being held and we are implementing a £2.5 million programme of electoral support to cover, among other things, the capacity of national and local media to report the elections. The programme will also support a coalition of national election monitors, and DfID will be funding international election observers through the National Democratic Institute. UK and EU observers will also be deployed. I turn to the questions put by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. First, it is right to highlight the value of the Cassese report and its recommendations. The United Kingdom is represented in New York on the management committee dealing with the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which will supervise the implementation of the recommendations made in the report. Financial security is an important factor andI am pleased to confirm that in the past few daysthe United Kingdom has made a further payment of £2 million to the court. We will continue to work with other key contributors to the court to ensure full funding. The latest SCSL budget is being discussed at the moment by the management committee, but I am confident that with our contribution we are beginning to see the kinds of provision that will be necessary to give it the financial stability that has been sought. I cannot predict to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, or the noble Lord, Lord Howell, how long the Taylor trial will last. At the moment that is not known, but if there is new information or a new assessment I will willingly share it with them. However long it lasts, we are committed to ensuring that the court has the funding that it needs for the period in which it conducts the trial. I do not share the noble Lord’s understanding about the move to The Hague. I will be explicit about my reasons. I believe that Freetown was always going to be difficult. The decision to arrange the move was certainly not taken unthinkingly; on the contrary, we pondered every detail of it long and hard, because we foresaw the question coming up of whether a trial conducted locally would have more impact on the people who had been directly affected. I shall say what the sequence was, because it is vital that the House should understand it. It is true that, for a period, ex-President Taylor was a guest, if I can put it that way, of President Obasanjo. I do notknow that one could say that his security was a problem—he was under house arrest and very closely supervised, and he did not move anywhere. He was not in prison but he was, in a sense, imprisoned. We then found, when the question of the possibility of a move to Freetown came up, that the newly elected President of Liberia made the point to us in forceful terms that she was asking President Obasanjo to send Charles Taylor to Freetown, and that she was very apprehensive. The trigger to get Charles Taylor out of Nigeria and to Freetown was the request of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. I remind the House that almost immediately the request was made, Taylor escaped. He was caught on the Nigerian border, not only in full flight but talking about the possibility of resurrecting some of the old forces that had gone around dismembering peoplein the region. By anyone’s standards, those arethe beginnings of a significant potential breach of security. However, I am delighted to say that he was recaptured. Then the threats, absolutely not from the victims—this is no insult to them—but from people who were his supporters, to attempt to free him from prison in Freetown gave rise to the anxieties that I have described. When you are asked by Kofi Annan, by President Johnson-Sirleaf and by ECOWAS—acting for the African Union as its competent regional body—to take these steps, that is, candidly, not something that you can easily ignore. I had the great privilege of meeting ambassadors and high commissioners from ECOWAS at lunchtime yesterday, and I know that some of them have been present in your Lordships’ House to see how this part of our process has been carried forward. I assure your Lordships that the desire of the region was to remove someone who was posing what we believed, for good security reasons, was a significant threat to a place where we could remove that threat. I believe that there will be a fair trial; we will press for it to be entirely fair, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has suggested. I hope that I have responded to the main points made by the noble Lord, Lord Howell. His understandings are correct, including the point about the hybrid Bill. Although there are more horrors and I cannot rule out that they could lead to further trials, I think that that is unlikely. The understanding of burden sharing is better embedded now in the international community. We will all have responsibilities, and we had a particular responsibility, as my noble friend Lord Anderson said, for Sierra Leone. Burden sharing is very important. The special court is the right mechanism in this case because it was so specific to the issues in the area, the nature of the witness pool and so on. We have not asked to share costs, principally because others are sharing the burdens in response to other trials. Obviously it would not be possible for the Netherlands, which has done a tremendous amount in organising the court proceedings, to say that because people happen to be tried in The Hague, as one of the great centres, the Netherlands should always pick up the issue of imprisonment. There is broad sharing, however, and all in all costs are pretty well distributed. I think it wholly unlikely that there will be an early release, but my understanding is that the international court system will make that determination. However, that can certainly be clarified. Any decision on asylum would plainly be made in the light of circumstances at the time, but if Taylor were to be convicted by the special court and if he served his sentence in the UK and was then released, I would expect him to leave the United Kingdom or face immediate removal. Under current immigration law, it is open to the Home Secretary to order the deportation of any non-British citizen whose removal from the United Kingdom is deemed conducive to the public good. Any asylum claim would be considered in accordance with the refugee convention, which contains provision to refuse asylum to those who are involved in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. That is a specific provision and, were this to result in a conviction, it would be hard to see how the person convicted would not be covered. On Scotland, we believed that we had the resources in England and Wales to do the job and that it was not necessary to go through a further legislative round in Scotland. I hope that that is acceptable to the House; it was never a question of resistance from the Scots Administration. We have come to see some crimes, such as those that scarred Sierra Leone, as so serious that they must be of concern to the international community as a whole, wherever they may occur and whoever may commit them. We have a responsibility to ensure that they are investigated and that those responsible are held to account. The primary responsibility for ensuring such prosecutions lies with individual states. I pay tribute to states such as Rwanda and those in the Balkans that are tackling some of these crimes from the past in their national courts. They will continue to have our support in that task. But where an individual state cannot or will not act, the international community must play its role. For that reason, the United Kingdom was instrumental in passing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1593, which referred the situation in Darfur to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. I welcome the progress made by the prosecutor in that investigation; the court can continue to count on us as it carries forward its work. In Sierra Leone, the international community is working hand in hand with the Government of Sierra Leone as they seek to come to terms with its bloody past. Sadly, international justice cannot bring justice for every victim, as so many of them are no longer alive to receive it. For every man, woman and child killed, scarred or traumatised, it cannot always do the whole job, but it can and it must none the less hold to account those responsible for such crimes. There is already anecdotal evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere that knowledge of the reach of international justice—it can extend even to some of the most inaccessible and war-torn parts of the globe—acts as a deterrent to future would-be warlords and war criminals. That is why we will continue to play our role and to commit the resources and expertise, where necessary, to help the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the wider system of international justice to do their work. On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.