My Lords, while I support the idea of changing international law, we have waited 60 years for this treaty to be ratified by the Government and if we had to wait for the same period of time for the convention—if it happened tomorrow—I would be about 120. So I think it is a wonderful idea to come forward, and of course the irony is not lost that we are talking about ratifying one treaty while of course most of the thoughts in this place are about another treaty.
I will ask the Minister one thing on the specific problem of the situation whereby much of the cultural heritage being targeted by non-state groups happens in areas we know are destabilised already—and of course, the formation of the cultural protection fund is a way of actually protecting some of those issues. But could the Minister say what proactive measures are put in place in the formation of the cultural protection fund to make sure that culture we know is under threat is being protected? Of course, we discussed digital archives. One wonderful way of doing it is digitally archiving all the archives around the world or helping museums to protect their archives. Of course, as in the case of the museum in Baghdad, that was a problem in itself because they wanted to loot the archive to find out what they could steal. That of course is an issue that will come forward and while we are in the position of forming the cultural protection fund, I very much hope that the Minister can give some indication that we will be taking the issue of pre-emptive knowledge very seriously, rather than trying to reconstruct what has been destroyed.