Geneva Conventions and United Nations Personnel

My Lords, the Bill has received a warm welcome from all sides of the House. I want to add only one or two short points. First, which symbol do the Government intend to use on medical vehicles? If, in humanitarian peacekeeping in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, there is a strong argument for our moving to the red crystal, can the Minister assure us that government Ministers will be robust in standing up to the unavoidable and inevitable response from the Daily Mail, the Sun and others if we shift from one symbol to another? Secondly, I wish to make further remarks on the concept of true neutrality for the UN and elsewhere. We have all learned that, sadly, many people in the world do not accept the concept that any organisation can be truly neutral. I fear that we have suffered to an extent from those neoconservatives in the United States who wanted to make sure that the UN is the servant of a particular concept of world order—the West alone. That has not helped the UN and is the sort of attitude to the UN that helped to fuel the dreadful events in Bagdad. I knew well one of those badly injured in the Bagdad bombing. We need to make sure that international organisations are seen to be as non-partisan as possible, even while recognising that there will always be some groups, some non-state actors, who simply refuse to recognise that anyone can be neutral in any single way. More and more humanitarian operations of the sort to which this extends protection will be taking place in parts of the world where there is no recognised authority or clear state, and where the idea of local authority will be highly contested. We have seen across the Great Lakes region, Sudan and elsewhere, the problems of trying to exist on law being enforced, particularly international law, and international courts. It throws extra complexity and extra tension into an already difficult situation. Perhaps the Minister would like to comment on how we should cope with international courts and international rights being added. Thirdly, the question of territorial extent under Clause 3 always comes up in Bills like this. I do not expect the Minister to reply to this, but I am always puzzled by the extent to which we allow very small territories, much smaller in extent than those which Her Majesty’s Government regard as appropriate for any local authority in Britain, to opt in or opt out of these very evident international organisations—the Isle of Man, the British Overseas Territories, the Channel Islands and so on. At some stage soon the House is going to have to ask the Government for a clear definition of how much we allow the British territories to opt in and out of very clear international obligations, rather than accepting that we legislate for them.