Geneva Conventions and United Nations Personnel

My Lords, I shall speak briefly in support of this Bill, which will enable Britain to ratify the Third Additional Protocol for the Geneva Conventions and the Optional Protocol on the Safety of UN and Associated Personnel. In so doing, I declare an interest as the chair of the United Nations Association of the United Kingdom. Like my predecessor in this debate, I congratulate the Minister on the rather unusual possibility of playing the ball from one end of the table and getting round to the other end in time to play it back again. No trend in recent years has been more shocking or despicable than the rise in attacks on UN and humanitarian personnel. Some episodes, such as the terrorist attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003, which resulted in the death of the UN’s greatly admired Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, received widespread publicity, as did the recent attacks on UN schools in Gaza; but far too many of these incidents pass over almost unnoticed by a general public who have become inured to such tragedies. I ask the Minister whether it is not high time that the Government took steps to commemorate with a public memorial the sacrifice by British citizens serving the UN and associated actions in this kind of operation. In any case, the least that we can do to help the effort to reverse this lamentable trend is to pass this legislation and, by so doing, to make our own modest contribution to providing greater protection and security to UN and associated personnel. The other provision in the Bill that will enable us to ratify the amendment to the Geneva Conventions recognising a third symbol, in addition to the red cross and the red crescent; namely, the red diamond—or another word that escapes me at the moment—seems to me equally worthy of support and extremely topical in a period that has seen hostilities in a region where the addition of the new symbol could be genuinely valuable. I should add that I doubt whether merely a confusion over symbols lies at the heart of some of the truly appalling incidents of disrespect for the basic precepts of international humanitarian law in and around Gaza. That is more properly a matter for debate that has, alas, lamentably been postponed for another 10 days, and in which I will unfortunately not be able to participate. I urge, therefore, that we give this measure a rapid and trouble-free passage through the House. I was a little startled to hear the noble Lord, Lord Howell, suggest that there were too many UN conventions. I am not sure which ones he would propose to cull, but I may have misunderstood what he said, and if so, I apologise. On the basis of recent experience, I suspect that if you were to ask the BBC whether it supported a measure designed to protect UN and associated personnel, it would decline on the basis that that would undermine its impartiality. As a lifetime supporter of the BBC’s right to exercise its own editorial judgment, I would not budge from that view, deeply though its decision to refuse to screen the Gaza appeal has dismayed and angered many of its friends. However, I reserve the right to say that I personally regard that decision as aberrant.