Syria

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to investigate breaches of international law by state and non-state actors in Syria with regard to sexual and gender-based violence and persecution of minorities.

[The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Anelay of St Johns) (Con)]

My Lords, we are appalled by all violations of international law in Syria. The situation should be referred to the International Criminal Court. We support non-governmental organisations and Syrian activists documenting human rights abuses, including sexual violence and minority persecution, for use in a future accountability process. Through our humanitarian partners, we have provided wide-ranging support for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in Syria and the region.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, there is evidence that all parties to the Syrian conflict have perpetrated crimes against women and children, including rape and terrible sexual violence, and such brutality has often been directed at minorities. The majority of such crimes constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity, and it is alleged that thousands of instances of crimes of this sort have been committed by Syrian Government forces, by ISIS, by the al-Nusra Front and the Free Syrian Army.

Crimes against women and children are often forgotten in the fog of war. What steps are being taken to train people properly to evidence-gather so that there can be prosecutions in future for those crimes? If such training is available, is it sensitive to the social pressure and taboos that are experienced by rape survivors, particularly in that part of the world?

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

The noble Baroness is right to point to the importance of ensuring that impunity does not prevail in these circumstances and that people on all sides of the conflict need to abide by international law. However, it is clear that it is Assad and his forces who are committing the vast majority of the offences that appal humanity.

With regard to investigating allegations of war crimes, the UK, together with the US, the EU, Germany and Norway are funding the Commission for International Justice and Accountability to develop documented legal case files, with named defendants, on regime and opposition—including ISIL—war crimes in Syria. So far, all this work has recovered about 1 million regime documents and archived 500,000 videos as a result of UK-trained and equipped investigators.

Libya

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Friday 1st April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I heartily endorse everything that the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has just said. We should have the imperatives of international law in mind here. I supported the creation of the no-fly zone in Libya, feeling that it was absolutely for the right reasons: we have to step in to prevent the killing of innocent civilians. Yet I cannot pretend that I was not torn.

No one in this Chamber can be immune to the obvious contradictions of any such intervention because in Côte d'Ivoire, at this very time, a murderous dictator is also killing his people. The United Nations has described the slaughter by Laurent Gbagbo of innocent people as possible crimes against humanity. Neighbours in Africa want him removed from power but no steps have been taken by the international community to do anything in his case. In next door Bahrain, opposition demonstrators have been killed by the regime which is now being assisted by the Saudis. Again, we have not chosen to act. I share the view that the fact that we cannot do the right thing everywhere does not mean we cannot do the right thing somewhere. However, we are also highly selective in how we use international law, which therefore creates a real degree of scepticism around the world about our purposes.

Any such intervention has to be based on law and international consent. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, about the importance of the concept of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine—in shorthand, R2P. That doctrine was formulated by the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001. We should remember that that was because of the genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans. The doctrine was then embraced unanimously by the General Assembly of the UN in 2005. I am in no way a neo-conservative. I believe, however, that there are times when we have to act. If human rights have any meaning at all, we have a duty to safeguard the humanity of people around the world.

The principle is simple. It is that we have a responsibility to protect our citizens from killing and ethnic cleansing, but we also have a responsibility to others. If a country is unwilling or unable to do so, or if the Government of a country are in fact the perpetrator of the violence, the international community has a duty to launch a military intervention. Yet there are six criteria which have to be met: it has to be a just cause; there has to be the right intention; it has to be last resort; the means have to be proportionate; there have to be reasonable prospects of success; and there has to be the right authority. In many ways, it replicates the law of self-defence as we have it in our domestic law. You are entitled to use proportionate force to defend yourself but also to use it is to defend someone else who is being attacked.

The UN Security Council deemed that those criteria which I have just mentioned for R2P had been met in this case. The bombing of Libyan army columns outside rebel-held Benghazi, to protect the residents from a threatened massacre by Gaddafi and his sons, satisfied the legal tests. I take the view that the resolution also covers the bombing of military installations. I do not agree with my noble friend Lord Parekh; there is evidence based on the past as well as the recent behaviour of Gaddafi.

Because of the mess that was made around law over the Iraq debacle, our Prime Minister was clear now that the same travesty could not be repeated and he rightly secured that UN resolution. I praise him for that. He also furnished the Cabinet with the full legal advice of the Attorney-General and, in turn, provided MPs with a note which properly reflected the legal advice authorising military action, so a lot had been learnt from the Iraq war failures. My concern is that the learning was not enough.

We are now falling into the same trap as we did in Iraq, where we are over-reading Resolutions 1970 and 1973 in order to justify what was not within the ambit of those who voted in favour of them. Resolution 1970 made it clear there was a total embargo on providing arms to either side. Resolution 1973 did not vary that position. It said that “all necessary means” should be used to prevent a massacre, but that is not the same as providing arms to rebels. Neither is it about regime change. Resolution 1973 provides no waiver of Resolution 1970. The noble Lord, Lord Trimble, asked whether the supply of reinforcements to Gaddafi from other parts of Africa would be a contravention of Resolution 1970: indeed it would, in my view.

We should remember from experience that arming rebels too often has consequences for the arms donor 10 years down the road. We remember all too well the cost of arming the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. Those very weapons that we gave to them are now being used against our own troops. Last week, I heard both David Cameron and Hillary Clinton maintain that Resolution 1973 could be interpreted to sanction the provision of armaments to the rebels. We are back in the Iraq situation, with our country and the United States interpreting resolutions in ways that suit our purposes. I remind the House of the convoluted legal arguments that were constructed around Resolution 1447 to say that we did not have to go back to the UN.

In this present conflict, our Government should be going back to the sanctions committee that was established under Resolution 1970. If we intend in any way to arm anybody, we have to secure a waiver on the arming embargo. Resolution 1970 created the mandate of the sanctions committee, which has the role of considering the ambit of that resolution. That is my answer to my noble friend Lord Parekh on who should be looking at the interpretation of resolutions. We should not be doing that without referring back but it is unlikely that we would secure any waiver or shift. That puts us between a rock and a hard place, because we all want to see the back of Gaddafi.

No Prime Minister likes to feel that he is failing in his purpose, even if the desired outcome was unspoken, but we must keep saying that regime change is not an objective sanctioned in law. The desired political outcome may be the removal of Gaddafi but, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, says, we have to do that by political means. There is a role for Turkey and Egypt.

I know that the possibility of being left with a stalemate, with Gaddafi still not gone, is one that we do not desire or want to contemplate but the alternative could be worse. We could be sucked into a lengthy conflict and I do not think that the people of this country want that. I remind the House and the Government that John Stuart Mill said it rather well and better than any of us. If a people want it, the love of liberty is the thing that enables them to wrest democracy—to wrest the liberty that they want—from their oppressors. If it is bestowed on them, I am afraid that it never has the same value—it is never as real or as permanent. So we have to let the people of Libya confront their abusers and win their own freedom. I know that that is hard because we can see on 24-hour television an unequal fight, but we have to be very mindful of international law.

Finally, it has been said that women have not been mentioned here yet in the discussion. I support what the Minister said about the role that we can play in democracy-building in somewhere like Egypt. However, all I can say is that my heart sank when I saw that there was not one woman on the constitutional committee that has been established for the new Egypt—not one woman. Yet we saw so many wonderful women in Tahrir Square during the period of revolt.

We have only recently had that horrible business on our screens—of seeing that young woman lawyer, Iman al-Obeidi, pleading for help from journalists and saying that she had been gang-raped by 15 of Gaddafi’s men. She was dragged away and has not been seen since. We have to have our voices heard on the things that are happening to women in these countries, and we must ensure that their voices are heard in the creation of anything new that comes out of these changes.