| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
“there is a real risk that his trial will feel distant and less meaningful to the people most affected by the crimes.”
I understand from the speech of the Foreign Office Minister Lord Triesman on Second Reading in the Lords that an outreach programme is in place. I invite
the Minister to expand a little today on what that programme involves. What actions does he understand are being taken to make this trial accessible to the people of Sierra Leone themselves? We need to ensure that the court is seen as legitimate and effective by the people of Sierra Leone, in order to allow the country to recover from the aftermath of this most dreadful war.
There is another issue on which I seek some clarification. Who precisely will make the decisions relating to an early release or a revision of the sentence, once the Special Court for Sierra Leone ceases to exist? On Second Reading in the Lords, Lord Triesman said that these decisions would be made by a designated successor body from within the international court system, but that the situation would be clarified later. Perhaps this is the right time for the Minister to confirm that that will be the case, and to expand on how he envisages the body will work, and who the likely members of it will be.
There is also concern about any possible claim that Charles Taylor might make after completing his sentence in a UK prison. In a statement, Lord Triesman said that the expectation is that Taylor would leave the UK on release or face removal, on the grounds that the refugee convention contains provisions to refuse asylum to those involved in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. However, on 15 April, The Sunday Telegraph published sections from a leaked ministerial memorandum stating that Taylor might choose to remain in Britain after his release, claiming asylum, and that this
“might represent a danger to the public or a drain on public resources”.
I realise that under current immigration law, it is of course 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, but can the Minister confirm today that if this situation arose, the Home Secretary would indeed be mindful not to grant asylum in those circumstances?
There have also been some criticisms of the way in which the court itself is being administered. On Second Reading in the Lords, my noble Friend Lord Avebury alluded to the report on the Special Court for Sierra Leone by Judge Antonio Cassese, to which the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) has also referred. Of course, Judge Cassese was appointed by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as an independent expert, with a mandate to review the efficiency of the Special Court. One issue that I want to press the Minister on today is the funding of the court itself. As I understand it, Judge Cassese is still concerned about the court’s insecure financial situation because of its reliance on voluntary contributions. In his report, he states that the United Nations has already had to bail the SCSL out three times already, costing a total of nearly $50 million.
Tony Baldry:
This is not a question of the UN having to bail out the court—it is a UN court. Her Majesty’s Government and other Governments such as the United States have funded this court. The hon. Gentleman cannot come to this Chamber as a Front-Bench spokesman, having basically got his facts right, and simply recite a load of criticisms from people such as Lord Avebury. He really ought to do his prep better. It is the UN that
should be funding the court, not us. We should not have to go cap in hand around the nations of the world getting penny numbers.
Mark Hunter: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. If he restrains himself for just a moment longer, he will discover that I was about to come on to the contribution that the British Government have made. I regret the fact that he seeks to create division in the House today, where I thought, to judge by the opening comments, there would be no significant division. [Interruption.] I stand by everything that I have said, and I will answer the hon. Gentleman, who is making comments from a sedentary position.
This lack of stable funding has made it difficult to provide a long-term plan, especially for ensuring that there are enough staff with the expertise needed to run the court effectively. The situation still needs to be addressed, despite protestations from the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry). I accept that this Government have recently pledged £2 million to the court, but can the Minister please give us an up-to-date account of the future funding situation?
Mrs. Curtis-Thomas: I rise to support the sentiment expressed by the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry). The reality is that this should be a UN-sponsored court, but the facts on the ground show that every prosecutor involved has to go cap in hand to countries such as ours, so that we can step in where the UN has failed to do so. The UN does deliver, eventually, but only part of what it promised and far too late. One cannot conduct the proceedings of a court on that basis. It is this country—and the US—that has provided the consistent funding needed to keep these trials going while the UN dithers. The role is the UN’s, not ours, and we should take the argument to the UN and not bring it home here.
Mark Hunter: I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. There is no fundamental disagreement between us. I have not said anything, implicitly or directly, to suggest that anybody other than the UN is responsible for the funding. Indeed, I have gone out of my way to acknowledge the contribution that the UK Government have made, but in the context of this debate, I am entitled to ask the Minister representing the Government for a current assessment of the future funding of this court. Frankly, I would be amazed if that were not a matter of some concern to Members in all parts of the House.
Judge Cassese’s report also contained several recommendations on how to improve the smooth running of the court, one of which is the strengthening of judicial leadership. Following the problems, which have been alluded to, involving surveillance cameras being placed in consultation rooms when the defendant met his lawyers, in accordance with International Criminal Court rules, Judge Cassese says that there needs to be clear leadership from the judges directly involved on which rules apply—those of the International Criminal Court, or those of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
The report also raises the issue of communication between staff in The Hague and Freetown, and between the Special Court and the ICC. These links do
indeed need to be strengthened if the court is to run effectively. Judge Cassese also said that the defence office needs to be reformed and properly funded to provide administrative, logistical and legal support for the defence team. That is particularly important, because the trial needs not only to be fair but to be seen to be fair if the court is to be a success. I should be interested to hear from the Minister today the opinion that the Government now have about Judge Cassese’s recommendations. The Minister might also tell the House which of those recommendations are likely to be implemented, and how the process of implementation is progressing.
As I made clear at the beginning of my contribution, in our view this legislation is welcome, and I am pleased that the UK is involving itself fully in the process of working actively and publicly to enforce human rights law. As a nation with influence, we need to send a clear signal that we are ready, willing and able to bring alleged perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity to justice. This Bill allows us to do just that.
3.8 pm
Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con): Africa is blessed with an amazing range of natural resources; Africa is cursed by an amazing range of natural resources. Sierra Leone is blessed with an amazing range of natural resources; Sierra Leone is cursed by an amazing range of natural resources. Sierra Leone is blessed with the possession of diamonds; Sierra Leone is cursed by possessing diamonds—and it is diamonds that started the story that results in our being here in this Chamber on this June Wednesday afternoon debating this issue.
This was not an outbreak of spontaneous, longstanding barbarity. There was a rational mind behind the acts of barbarity that happened in Sierra Leone. People wanted to control diamonds and the wealth that comes from them. There is a story that has yet to be told about how diamonds from Sierra Leone came to fund, in part, the 9/11 atrocities perpetrated by al-Qaeda. When the US and other intelligence forces tried to identify where the money had come from, they found it difficult to do so. The reasonable inference that was eventually drawn was that much of the funding came from diamonds, which are very valuable and almost impossible to trace. It was the desire to control diamonds that caused Charles Taylor and others to provoke the West Side Boys, the Revolutionary United Front and others to commit the atrocities that they did in Sierra Leone.
The hon. Member for Crosby ((Mrs. Curtis-Thomas) spoke movingly of the effect and impact on the victims. People were asked whether they were left-handed or right-handed and, depending on the answer they gave, one or other arm was hacked off with a machete. I am glad to say that in the court it has been accepted, for the first time, that suborning children to perpetrate acts of barbarity is an international criminal offence.
There is another issue that needs to be cleared up if we are not to get confused about this issue. Left to themselves, the Sierra Leoneans probably did not want an international tribunal. Let it not be forgotten that
Hinga Norman was seen by many in Freetown as a saviour of Freetown. He was on the Government side. Left to his own devices, President Kabbah would probably have followed the example of South Africa and had a truth and reconciliation commission. However, it was important for the international community to have closure on the issue and, not least, to bring Charles Taylor to trial and make the point that even heads of state are not immune from international law. Nor was the international community going to allow the natural resources of Africa to be plundered by terrorists and those wishing to perpetrate acts of terrorism throughout the world.
A compromise was achieved, and it is important that we understand that it was a compromise between President Kabbah, the Government of Sierra Leone and the international community, in which the somewhat curious hybrid body of the Special Court for Sierra Leone was established by treaty with the United Nations. President Kabbah was happy to do that and indeed he had himself had a distinguished career at the United Nations.
There may have been some confusion as to whether the courts are best conducted locally—in the country where the offences were committed—or at the ICC in The Hague. We have to decide whether we wish to promote the ICC or whether the trials should take place in the country where the offences took place. That happened with Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and we are about to take a decision about Lebanon. If we want to give credibility to the ICC, it needs all the support it can get. I suspect that there will be comparatively few circumstances in which we see a hybrid court, such as that for Sierra Leone; Cambodia is another example.
I did not mean to be as testy as I was with the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter) and I am sorry if I sounded uncharacteristically bad-tempered. It is rare for me to support Government Front Benchers, but on this occasion I wish to support the Foreign Office, because it and the Prime Minister have been extraordinarily good on this issue. The Special Court was established under the auspices of the UN, but it did little to fund it. The costs included setting up the court, running the prison and the funding for the prosecution and defence, as well as the funds needed for the staff who went out into the bush investigating, interrogating and taking witness statements, often with translation required. Those were not inconsiderable and, as the hon. Member for Crosby made clear, Professor David Crane and Desmond da Silva QC—now Sir Desmond—had to spend much time going to Washington to say that they were running out of money. That is not a criticism of the Government and the Foreign Office, but one cannot run international courts on that basis. It seemed somewhat cack-handed of the Secretary-General of the UN to send his own person to investigate a court and for that person to return to say that the court needed more money. The Secretary-General should know that, and should ask other members of the Security Council to put their hands in their pockets to support the court if they believe in international law and order. Otherwise, whenever we come to a similar situation, we will react in the same ad hoc fashion. We cannot have a system of international law that operates like that.
The trials take so long because the system is ad hoc. Every time a tribunal is set up, the first six months to a year is taken up with the court justifying its jurisdiction. Every jurisdictional point possible is made by the defence to try to prove that the court has no authority to hear the case. We must put a system of international law in place that is respected, well funded and certain. It is possible, in the fullness of time, that the ICC will arraign before it people from Sudan in relation to Darfur. It would be ludicrous to spend the first two years of any such hearings arguing about the jurisdiction of the court. It would be crazy if in every prosecution at the Old Bailey days were spent on arguing whether the judges there had the right to hear cases. We have to move on. I direct those comments not at those on the Treasury Bench, but at the whole international community. It is in the interests of that international community that evil men do not seek to control resources in Africa and use the funds from those resources for acts of evil.
This issue is unfinished business for all of us. When the Prime Minister reported back from the G8 summit on Monday, he said:
“In addition, the G8 committed itself to identifying, agreeing and supporting lasting solutions to the financing of peacekeeping missions in Africa.”—[ Official Report, 11 June 2007; Vol. 461, c. 515.]
As I have said, I think that what the UK Government did in Sierra Leone was brilliant and the high commissioner at the time, Peter Penfold, and others deserve much credit. However, it was a unilateral decision by the UK, which is one of the very few countries in the world that has the lift capacity and the professionalism to put people in to undertake such an operation. The international community as a whole will have to work out how it will finance and operate peacekeeping missions. I am sure that everyone has been following the tragedy of Darfur, but there has been an African Union mission and a UN mission, and we now have a hybrid mission. We have been trying to find a structure that works, but we need to have one in place before a tragedy happens, and not after.
Lastly, I endorse what the Secretary of State for International Development said at the end of our Darfur debate last week. It was a very powerful speech, and we all ought to endorse it. He asked:
“When are we going to live up to the fine and inspiring words of the UN declaration of human rights?”—[ Official Report, 5 June 2007; Vol. 461,c. 228.]
He went on to quote from the declaration, which states:
‘Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people... Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”
The poorest countries of the world, including Sierra Leone, have the right to life, liberty and security of person. The message that the Special Court sends out is that those most responsible for crimes against humanity will be brought to book, prosecuted and sentenced.
My final observation is that I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Crosby. People who are found guilty
of crimes against humanity of this kind should be sentenced to life, and that should mean that they remain in prison for the rest of their lives.
3.21 pm
Simon Hughes (North Southwark and Bermondsey) (LD): First, I apologise to the Minister and his opposite number for not being present to hear all of their speeches. I watched some of the debate as I was carrying out other duties in the House, but I wanted to contribute a few words in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter) and other colleagues.
At probably every weekly surgery over the past 10 years I have had to deal with the problems suffered by people originally from Sierra Leone. They still come, even now—either people whom I have never met before or those whose cases I have been dealing with. Their family histories contain the same story that other speakers have set out. Asked if their parents are alive, they say no, they were killed in the civil war, and the same is very often true of their brothers and sisters. Some of the stories are even worse, involving rapes, attacks, and the brutal removal of limbs as a matter of course. People who did not immediately agree with the war had their arms or legs hacked off by machete, so even if I had not followed the story as a Member of Parliament, I would have had no choice but to take a concerned interest in what was going on in Sierra Leone.
I visited Sierra Leone a few years ago, and hope to go back again later this year. On my visit, I learned that of all the countries that I have been to, Sierra Leone is the one that feels itself most close to Britain. It has a love for and a commitment to Britain, so it is absolutely right that our Government, fuelled by the conviction of the Prime Minister, decided to intervene when things were at their terrible worst. The sense of rescue when British troops arrived engendered a huge amount of joy and encouragement in the people of Sierra Leone, and across the country as a whole, regardless of party affiliation or region.
The decision to go in was right, as was the decision to continue our specific interests. Also, Britain was right to decide to help bring about the end of the civil war, and to support the initiative of the democratically elected President of Sierra Leone to hold an international tribunal. I have long considered that international law is no good if it is used only to resolve public disputes about boundaries, or sea lanes between continents, and so on. International law must also deal with international criminal activity, so I and my party have believed for many years that the ICC is a fundamental element of the post-war new order. As the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) reminded us, it gives the world an opportunity to implement the principles of the UN. It is no good telling people that we stand for their liberty if no mechanism exists for dealing with leaders of countries who do not recognise the liberty of others.
It is obvious that President Taylor and others crossed Sierra Leone’s border with Liberia because of diamonds. The appropriateness of borders left as a colonial legacy is still a cause for argument in Africa, but there is no doubt that the people of Sierra Leone
were not able to defend their country’s border with Liberia. As a result, there was an open invitation for people to cross the border to pillage and rape the country of its wealth, and that is what they did. Going into another country without permission, authority or endorsement and supporting civil opposition to the elected Government is an international crime that deserves to be punished. The arrest of Charles Taylor is entirely justified, as is the fact that he is now facing trial.
We can have a debate about where that trial should be held, as the hon. Member for Banbury noted. He reminded us that that problem will always remain unresolved. Logic suggests that any trial should be held in an international centre that has the organisation, equipment and services to handle it. However, a trial is no good if it is not backed up by the resources needed to sustain it, and that is a principal responsibility of the UN. That holds true even in cases such as this, which are, as it were, a specially arranged adjunct to the process of international law by treaty agreement, as opposed to a straightforward implementation of the ICC.
I have three other points to make. Sierra Leone is a peace-loving country, and its people are very gentle but, as the hon. Member for Crosby (Mrs. Curtis-Thomas) reminded us, it is still bottom but one in the world’s poverty league table. A foreign leader intervened to terrible effect in its affairs, and the Sierra Leonean community, both at home and abroad, wants the matter to be seen through to a conclusion. That must happen so that well-meaning and community-minded citizens of Sierra Leone around the world can believe that their still extremely fragile democracy will be safe.
The process of this year’s general election in Sierra Leone will be no easier than the previous election. President Kabbah is not standing again, so there will be a new president. Some families have a dynastic interest, as is to be expected, but I am really encouraged by the fact that the Liberal Democrat group on my borough council contains two Sierra Leoneans who support different parties in their home country. That shows that there will be a democratic election in a country which both had to leave because of the tyranny there. That is a real sign of hope and an encouragement of democracy and the things that go with it.
I want to add to the support for the change proposed in the Bill by making a plea to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and other Departments that they continue to support effectively organisations such as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, so that the delicate democracies of countries such as Sierra Leone can continue to be supported and are never again put at risk by any intervening external power.
I pay tribute in passing to Peter Penfold, an extremely eminent former high commissioner to Sierra Leone, who has continued his much appreciated interest in the country. In my borough, we have Derek Partridge—another much appreciated former high commissioner to Sierra Leone—who, like all our senior diplomats there, did a fantastic job in supporting the local community.
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |