My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for his amendment and his excellent speech, which said everything that needs to be said around this very difficult area, with considerable skill and a huge amount of information that we will need time to absorb.
The House seems united in the view that this is a serious issue that has a lot of support and needs to be implemented. I will be interested to hear how the Minister responds to it. What is most attractive about the amendment is the innovative use of the courts as a way of trying to give a point of factual accuracy around which decisions can be taken. I have not seen this before; it is not something that we have ever had proposed and it is worthy of further consideration. Indeed, it may have wider applications.
That puts the House in a bit of a spot. If it is clear that there is a way of checking, in a way that is respected in the use of our courts, to assess whether or not an action needs to be taken, are we not put on
notice to live up to our responsibilities as signatories to this convention to prevent, protect and punish? Indeed, if we care about our moral values as a nation, we should have no grounds not to support the amendment.
Having said that, I wonder whether it is worth picking up one or two points that suggest that a bit more work on the amendment might make it achieve even more. Others have picked up on the question of why it is applied only to rollover agreements when it has the capacity to deal with all free trade agreements. Although this is a terrible thing to say, why stop at the issue of genocide? Are there not other egregious issues that would need to be considered in the same class as genocide? As my noble and learned kinsman Lord Hope said, the torture convention may well be an opportunity for further thinking around this area.
While I support what has been said today about the proposal and I want to give whatever assistance we can to the movers of the amendment, I suggest that maybe there should be other discussions before we reach Report, because what is said in the amendment goes with the grain of so many other amendments that we have looked at around the question of human rights that it would be good to see if we could find something that brought them all together. We need something that is helpful to the broader causes that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, espouses but is capable of bringing in other issues that other Members of the House also care about.