Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Whitehead, on his opening speech, his maiden speech, opening his scoring in this House. May his subsequent contributions be as good as this one: it will be a fine record.

The Bill to which we are giving a Second Reading today, the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdictions Bill, has a complex and difficult to understand title, and an equally complex content. Nevertheless, I argue that it is a necessary and desirable major step towards implementing some of the obligations the UK assumed when it signed two other important international treaties, the Law of the Sea Convention, known as UNCLOS, and the Biodiversity Convention, both of which we signed more than 30 years ago and subsequently ratified. I should perhaps admit that I was Britain’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations when the negotiations of those two founding treaties were concluded. Both were concluded under a Conservative Government whose Prime Minister was John Major, who picked up the baton first held by the late Baroness Thatcher, who came to realise that collective global action was a necessity if the challenges of global warming and loss of biodiversity were to be reversed, or at least mitigated. So I suggest at the outset that this implementing measure deserves to be treated on a non-party basis. Whether it will be is for others to decide.

The urgency of the legislation we are discussing has been spoken to by several noble Lords. It will enable the UK to participate from the outset in the governance procedures of this convention, protecting the biodiversity of those sea areas that fall outside national jurisdictions—what is often known as the “open seas”. Those seas are open too to abuse amounting to plunder, and thus require protection, and Britain’s record justifies and requires its presence on these governance procedures, which, whatever we decide, will enter into force at the beginning of 2026. The historical record of those who fish in and otherwise exploit the resources of these waters is not, let us face it, a good one. Modern technology has facilitated overfishing of stocks, some of them to extinction, and the enlargement of the areas where exploitation can take place is an inevitable result of global warming, particularly in the Arctic, making the problem more extensive and the need for protective regulation, such as this convention provides the basis for, more urgent. That regulation cannot be successfully achieved on a national rather than an international basis, as the provisions of this Bill eloquently demonstrate.

We often hear in this House about the need to defend the rules-based international order. That catch-all phrase probably confuses as much as it persuades, but there can be little doubt that that order is under serious threat on issues relating to international peace and security, world trading rules and the environment. Here is an opportunity not just to circle the wagons around existing rules but to extend their scope, which is, in general terms, the Government’s policy and that of the Official Opposition. We need to take it up.

This debate would not be complete without a reference to one notable and substantial absentee: the United States of America. The US Congress has declined to ratify the Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS, despite its provisions being so valuable to its strategic interests—for example, in the South China Sea—that the US recognises UNCLOS as customary international law. It declined to sign the biodiversity convention in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and has sustained that refusal ever since on the erroneous grounds that it would damage the US’s biotechnology industries, even though the main failing of the biodiversity convention is that it is too weak, not too strong. America will decide for itself what is in its interest, but I hope the Minister will confirm, when winding up the debate, that we will continue to urge the US to join these conventions and to hold the door open for it, should it have a change of heart.