My Lords, this has been an incredibly instructive debate. Every single speaker has spoken in favour of Amendment 14 in a debate that has lasted an hour, and they could not have been more diverse in their experience: lawyers, military people, senior politicians. We have had the whole range, and they have all spoken in favour of Amendment 14.
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That is hardly surprising because the Government are proposing to introduce a presumption against prosecuting people for torture, genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. The chief prosecutor of the ICC wrote a letter to the Secretary of State for Defence in the past few days saying that we would all lose—victims, the court and ICC state parties—were the United Kingdom
“to forfeit what it has described as its leading role, by conditioning its duty to investigate and prosecute serious violations of international humanitarian law, crimes against humanity and genocide”
on a statutory presumption against prosecution after five years. I completely agree; the people who would suffer would be our military because they would become more vulnerable to be prosecuted in the ICC. We would be sending a message to the world that we were retreating from doing all we could to stop torture, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. That is not something that the British Government should be doing, because it is wrong and because of the practical impact.
I very much hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, will take back the message from the Lords to the Ministry of Defence that there is almost universal opposition to not including among the offences not covered by the presumption torture, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. I hope that she also takes back the message that she agrees and that those crimes should be put into the exempted category.
On a technical note, I support my noble friends Lord Robertson of Port Ellen and Lord West of Spithead and the noble Lords, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem and Lord Alton of Liverpool, in their way of dealing with this matter—that is, putting those crimes into the body of the Bill and not in a schedule, so that the Government cannot change the position by a statutory instrument subsequently. I also support an amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe that the power to remove by statutory instrument any offences in the schedule at the moment should be removed. In that way, the Government cannot change their mind on, for example, sexual offences and remove their exemption from the presumption.
I cannot express more strongly the support of this side of the Committee for Amendment 14.