International Organisations (Immunities and Privileges) Miscellaneous Provisions Order 2006

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this order which we are pleased to support. We support the Civil Partnership Act and hence we support orders such as this which fill out the outer edges of the framework of civil partnership. There have been rather a lot of orders dealing with civil partnerships since the Bill was passed. After several batches, I asked the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Temple Guiting, how many more were to come. On 27 October 2005 he wrote to me with quite a long list of orders still in the pipeline. This order was not on the list. The noble Lord wisely covered his position by saying that he could not give a,"““cast iron guarantee that there have been no omissions””." It is clearly just as well that he registered that proviso. So I shall ask my question again: will the Minister say how many more civil partnership orders we are going to get, whether subject to the affirmative or the negative procedure? That will give us a fix on how much more there is to do. We should like to declare this job well and truly over. Turning to the specific order, we welcome the extension of the relevant immunities and privileges to civil partners. That is clearly right. But will the Minister explain the position in relation to the civil partners of diplomats and others from this country who go overseas? How many countries give an equivalent recognition to the civil partners of those from this country who go overseas? I rather anticipate that not many countries will have got that far yet, and therefore perhaps I may invite the Minister to tell us what the Government are doing to ensure that other countries afford the civil partners of people from our country similar rights and privileges when they go overseas on Her Majesty’s business.