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POLICE (INSURANCE OF VOLUNTARY ASSISTANTS) BILL [LORDS] [MONEY]
Queen's recommendation having been signified--
Motion made, and Question proposed,
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Police (Insurance of Voluntary Assistants) Bill [Lords], it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of any increase attributable to the Act in the sums which under any other Act are payable out of money so provided.--[Mr. Coe.]
Resolved,
War Crimes
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Coe.]
10 pm
Sir Cyril Townsend (Bexleyheath): I am grateful for the opportunity to debate again the War Crimes Act 1991. I last had an Adjournment debate on the subject on 9 July 1992. Since then, of course, Britain's first war crimes trial has collapsed. My message is clear--the absurd business should never have begun and should now be brought immediately to a halt before further police time and public money are wasted.
The case against the Act is even stronger now than it was in 1991. The issue attracts powerful emotions. It has divided both sides of the House, and it has divided the House from another place. I believe that that controversial and peculiar legislation first arose from a visit paid to the state of Israel by Baroness Thatcher when she was Prime Minister. The Israeli authorities disliked her strong and justified words about the way in which they treated the Palestinians. Looking for something to help improve her relations with the Israeli Government, Baroness Thatcher agreed to consider allowing trials of alleged war criminals said to be living in Britain.
As a result, the Home Secretary of the day set up an inquiry which was asked to examine documents submitted by the Simon Wiesenthal centre, which is itself controversial. Sir Thomas Hetherington and Mr. William Chalmers submitted their report to the Home Secretary in June 1989. It is worth noting how long ago their report was written and how slowly events have moved since then. One wonders whether the authors of that report would still be in favour of prosecutions after such a long delay. I suspect not.
The inquiry considered 369 cases and it recommended that 75 of them should be accorded further investigation. Amazingly, those involved reached the conclusion that there were only three individuals against whom evidence existed to meet the demands for prosecutions. In the parliamentary debates that followed, the Commons backed the legislation. Some 55 Tory Members--including myself, I am proud to say--voted against the legislation. I welcome the Minister who will reply to the debate, but I could not find out how he voted. It looks as if he abstained, but perhaps he will comment on that point.
I understand that the Prime Minister voted against the concept of legislation right at the beginning of the proceedings. Certainly, strong views were expressed in the Cabinet against such legislation. The other place rejected legislation by an overwhelming majority, the Law Lords apparently being unwilling to go down that path.
Conservative peers who opposed the legislation were led by those of the calibre of Lord Carrington, Lord Hailsham, Lord Home of The Hirsel and Lord Havers. Such peers represented the generation that lived through the second world war. They knew better than younger people of the Nazi horrors, the holocaust and, of course, the Nuremberg trials. In their speeches, those people constantly referred to the decision by Bevan, Attlee and Churchill in 1948 to cease war crimes trials. With those most responsible for the war largely sentenced, those three eminent politicians thought that it would be wrong to reach down and seek to prosecute every lance-corporal in Hitler's SS for what had happened.
In both Houses, many speakers mentioned that the legislation would be retrospective--something about which many of us are always extremely cautious.
The Act is directed against a small group of men, now British citizens but formerly citizens of the Baltic states, who are accused of being responsible for murders in German-occupied territory during the second world war.
Mr. David Sumberg (Bury, South):
Was not the essence of the legislation the fact that those men were not British citizens? Had they been British citizens when they committed or may have committed the crimes, they would have been liable to be prosecuted for murder. There was therefore a lacuna in the law, which treated those who were not born British more favourably than those who were.
Sir Cyril Townsend:
My hon. Friend has a valid point; a murder is a murder. Had those men remained in the original territories and had they been tried at an earlier stage, all would have been well. I do not dispute my hon. Friend's observation.
I object to the fact that the legislation is so restricted--restricted to those few men. It does not attempt to cover the all too many atrocities committed elsewhere during and after the war. For example, my father fought in the Burma campaign. The Japanese war crimes are ignored, although the treatment of British prisoners of war was horrendous. More recent crimes committed in Palestine, Cambodia and Iraq are not covered either. The legislation is highly restricted. That is the point that I would put to my hon. Friend.
The House of Commons does not come out well as a result of its support for the legislation. A tiny, well-financed overseas pressure group seeking revenge and retribution was able to have far too much influence on the Commons. I suspect that too many of my colleagues found it prudent to go along with the legislation rather than to take a stand--although I must add that I was under no particular pressure from my Bexleyheath constituents. I suggest that that was a bad case of the tail wagging the dog, and of Parliament being pushed around by pressure groups.
Will the legislation reduce anti-Semitism? Obviously, that would be the objective of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Sumberg) and myself. In a letter to The Times on 29 July 1989, Lord Shawcross, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, expressed views that also represent mine:
When the Bill went through Parliament, its supporters, including Ministers, drew attention to the experience of Canada, Australia and Israel, which had passed laws along roughly the same lines. Subsequent experience in those countries has confirmed the worst expectations of the Bill's opponents. Israel, for example, had the grim and ghastly affair of the wrong Ivan the Terrible being
convicted. Will the Minister list those countries that are still proceeding in that regard? I think that Russia is one of the very few.
I said in my previous Adjournment debate that the bill could be perhaps £10 million before this shocking affair is behind us. What has been spent so far? The Guardian claimed on 4 February this year that £6 million had gone towards the Metropolitan police costs and £2 million for the Crown Prosecution Service. When the time of Ministers and civil servants is properly taken into account, my figure of £10 million still looks possible. Press reports have suggested a figure of £15 million.
In a parliamentary question in July 1992 I asked how many police officers, of what ranks, were employed in police work flowing from the War Crimes Act 1991. I was told that in England and Wales there were one detective chief superintendent, one detective chief inspector, three detective inspectors, one detective sergeant, three detective constables and two police constables: a total of 11. The figure in Scotland was three.
The Metropolitan police war crimes unit was also supported by seven civilians. I hope that the Minister will tell the House what action, if any, is still going on in New Scotland Yard. Is the unit still in existence, albeit frozen? Is the Metropolitan police budget making any contribution at this stage, as was suggested some years ago? It would be wrong if that were the case, because war crimes are a national not a local matter.
As a London Member, I say unhesitatingly that the time of those 11 officers could and should have been much better spent dealing with today's terrorists, murderers, rapists and burglars in the Metropolitan police area. Surely the Minister will recognise that a detective chief superintendent is a most valuable individual--a key piece on the crime chessboard--whose time, dealing, for example, with London's new armed gangs and the masters of the drugs scene, could have brought major benefits.
According to the Lord Advocate, there are to be no war crimes trials in Scotland. What is the future of war crimes trials in England in 1997? A few weeks ago, Szymon Serafinowicz, an 86-year-old retired carpenter from Banstead in Surrey, was found unfit to stand trial by an Old Bailey jury. They had heard evidence that he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He had faced serious charges of murdering unknown Jews in Belarus between 1941 and March 1942. That is a long time ago. The Minister himself did not grace our world until April 1945.
What exact details can anyone recall in 1997 of events in 1941, 56 years ago? The trials revolve around correct identification, as the Israelis found so embarrassingly to their cost. A few years ago, after the comparatively recent riots at Wapping, I was intrigued to see that a judge dismissed a trial on the ground that the events took place too long ago for people to be able to recall the exact details.
The more atrocious the crime, the more scrupulously the rules of criminal justice should be observed. Lord Donaldson, when Master of the Rolls, pointed out that a case turning on identification 45 years after an alleged offence was a preposterous proposition. What would he think of a period of 50 or even 60 years?
The Director of Public Prosecutions has, for various reasons that I am not clear about, refused to set a cut-off point for the trials. I do not believe that war crimes trials held in the inevitable blaze of publicity can possibly add
to the reputation of our legal system--at the moment, a rather damaged reputation--but they could certainly harm it further.
The reality is that more than 100 people on the initial list of suspects have died. The tiny and pathetic group of elderly people who remain on the list--I believe that we are still talking of about five people--have nothing left to offer, and a short while left to live. It would now be amazing if a successful prosecution took place, and even more amazing if an individual were sent to prison--most likely to the prison hospital.
The journalist Milton Shulman wrote a few years ago:
"Revival of these sad and terrible matters by sensational trials of a small handful of aged men, which will take years to conduct and which will start with an assumption of guilt, will not help to promote understanding and friendship between the different peoples of the world, will not help eliminate the evils of anti-semitism nor, still less, enhance respect for British justice".
There are many aspects of the Act, and in a short debate I shall not have time to touch on them all, but I shall raise some of them briefly.
"There is no excuse for these proceedings which have become an aberration of British justice. It is intolerable that such an inhuman and costly fiasco should continue to run and run."
In a leading article in January 1995, The Daily Telegraph had this to say:
"None of this should be taken to imply that any of us should forget or excuse the WAR CRIMES and their perpetrators. The wickedness of those who committed dreadful deeds 50 or more years ago is not in doubt. But when the resources of police forces up and down the land are stretched to the limit, to devote millions to WAR CRIMES investigations that have such scant prospects of success is not only futile, but profligate.
Exactly so--and further large sums of public money will continue to be wasted until this fiasco is killed off. It would have been much more sensible to spend the millions of pounds that have been spent on, for example, improving war widows' pensions.
The WAR CRIMES BILL was chiefly a personal folly of Lady Thatcher in her last months of office . . . Large sums of public money have been wasted in pursuit of objectives which most sensible voices from the outset declared to be unattainable."
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