Landmines and Cluster Munitions

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the announcement by NATO allies, including Baltic states and Poland, that they intend to withdraw from the Ottawa Treaty on anti-personnel landmines and the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

My Lords, I thank everyone who will be speaking today. No doubt we will hear a range of views. I am sure all of us would rather this debate had been prompted by new ratifications of these treaties, rather than withdrawals, and by a more reassuring security situation in Europe. But I trust we can all agree that it is not a lack of commitment to international law or to arms control that has led Poland, Finland and the Baltic states to announce their withdrawal from the Ottawa treaty and Lithuania to withdraw from the Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions. These are free, law-abiding, peace-loving nations led by mainstream political parties: centrist parties affiliated with the European People’s Party in Poland, Finland and Latvia, social democrats in Lithuania and the liberals in Estonia.

I co-authored the recent report by Policy Exchange on these developments. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Godson, for his intellectual leadership and Air Marshal Ed Stringer, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, for his invaluable expertise on defence matters. There is a question mark in the title of that report because I do not yet have firm answers to the questions we posed, but these questions are urgent and we need to hear what our Government’s thinking is.

On that note, in an Answer to a Written Question on this topic on Tuesday, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said the UK will continue

“to engage bilaterally on the actions States plan to take”.

Can the Minister tell us a bit more about the engagement that the Government have had so far with our five allies, following their announcement? Can she also tell us whether there has been any engagement with the French Government on this matter?

While our focus today is on the Ottawa treaty and the Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions, we must remember that other important treaties and arrangements for our security are in crisis. The 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe was suspended by Russia in 2007. In November 2023, Russia withdrew. Russia has also withdrawn from the open skies treaty. Russia has stopped all verification visits under the 2011 Vienna Document, a very important confidence and security-building instrument.

On the non-conventional front, the picture is also very concerning. Since 2018, NATO has declared Russia in breach of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The US withdrew in 2019, citing Russia’s continued non-compliance as a reason. In 2023, Russia rescinded its ratification—as it put it—of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.

Russia was never a party to the Ottawa treaty, although it was, and still is, a party to a pre-Ottawa treaty that regulates, but does not ban, the use of landmines. Everyone else in Europe, including Belarus, joined the Ottawa treaty. The Americans did not. The main reason they gave was the defence of South Korea, which has a land boundary of 240 kilometres with North Korea. South Korea has a very advanced military with an active personnel of 500,000 and the second-largest reserve army in the world at more than 3 million. There is a long-standing and significant American military presence in South Korea. Each of the five countries that announced its withdrawal from the Ottawa treaty has a longer land boundary with Russia and Belarus than South Korea has with North Korea. Their armed forces are considerably smaller than South Korea’s, and the Joint Expeditionary Force, which we lead, is also smaller than the US forces in the Korean peninsula. In that sense, it is not surprising that these European allies, in the much more challenging position they face, with Russia on the other side, have concluded that they too may need anti-personnel landmines for their defence.

My Lords, I take a different view from that of the noble Lord. For a long time I have been involved in campaigns against anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions. Indeed, I have visited the clearing teams in south Lebanon dealing with cluster bombs, and I have met the MAG people in Vietnam who were clearing unexploded ordnance all over the country.

Sixty countries are contaminated. For example, 2 million landmines have been put in Ukraine since February 2022. The problem is that both cluster bombs and landmines are there long after the conflict is over. Cluster bombs do not always explode on impact, and the landmines are hidden away, causing enormous danger to civilians who want to go there long after the conflict: children playing and women collecting water or planting crops. We are leaving countries badly contaminated. The military uses are questionable. I remember an American marine general saying that he would not send his marines where there had been cluster bombs, because if they were to march forward, they would get injured by them.

I attended the Dublin meeting, at which the UK’s influence was maximal. Gordon Brown sent a message saying, “We should sign” on cluster bombs. Other countries said, “If the UK supports this, it must be okay”. We have led the world and set a good example.

Refugees cannot go home safely because their land and fields are contaminated. In Afghanistan, there are 2,200 staff clearing mines and other ordnance. About half of them have been removed already.

I very much regret that Poland and the Baltic states have taken the view they have. The UK should set an example through continuing to fund the clearance of landmines. I feel very emotional about this. I hope the Minister will respond positively.

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. We have debated this issue before—18 years ago. I have to say that, in the 25 years I have known the noble Lord, he does not seem to have aged at all. He is still just as effective.

According to your Lordships’ Library, there are only two people in this Parliament who have both operational overseas military experience and operational overseas aid experience—the other one is Alex Ballinger MP.

In 2006, I was the only Back Bencher who counselled caution about the noble Lord’s Bill, and my counsel on the issue has not changed. Some may think that the military advice from myself—and, more importantly, from the noble and gallant Lord who will speak shortly—takes no account of the suffering caused by these munitions and is heartless. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In 1995, I was running an NGO in Rwanda. Every time I passed a hospital in Kigali, I saw young Rwandan soldiers with either one or both lower limbs missing. The blood was often still seeping through their bandages. These images are still with me now, just as strongly as the fatalities and other life-threatening emergencies I have had to deal with. Obviously, these soldiers were victims of landmines.

However, my counsel is to support the Policy Exchange paper and listen very carefully to the noble and gallant Lord.

Finally, the Minister will have to make even more really difficult decisions—and quite soon, because of the six-month rule.

My Lords, it is a pleasure following both noble Lords, Lord Attlee and Lord Dubs.

At our safe distance away from the front line of facing Putin’s Russia, it is harder for us to understand the threat that the Baltic states, Poland, Finland and other countries face.

Many people think that landmines are a tool of wars past, but Russia’s war on Ukraine is an old-style war, with trenches in the grinding front line. Drones and other modern techniques have added to—not taken away—the threat of unexploded ordnance. Ukraine now has the largest amount of unexploded ordnance in the world.

During the debate on International Women’s Day, I spoke of the all-women landmine teams in Ukraine and other countries who are trained and supported by UK-based HALO and MAG and funded by international aid from a number of countries, including the UK. At a time when other European countries talk of leaving the Ottawa agreement because of threats of invasion on their doorsteps, it is vital that this aid continues.

Tomorrow is Anti-Landmine Day. Today, in the APPG, we heard of a de-mining programme that also helps local people develop and enrich the cleared soil and start growing things again: wheat, vines and olives, whatever the local needs are.

The FCDO has a proud history of supporting landmine and cluster bomb clearance. Regardless of the decisions by the countries facing Russia and the many other countries still living with landmines, can the Minister assure your Lordships’ House that de-mining projects will remain a priority?

This is so much more: local people are trained in a range of skills. As mines are cleared, the trained staff also work with their communities, who are still often fearful and living with the day-to-day consequences of war. They too are given the tools—the cleared earth—to rebuild their lives, create food and recreate their local economy. These FCDO grants work miracles—but, above all, these grants save lives.

My Lords, in the brief time allotted, I want to make simply one point and pose two questions.

My point is that the law of armed conflict does not prohibit the killing of civilians. It says they must not be targeted, that they must be protected as far as is feasible, and that the risk posed to civilians by military operations must be proportionate to the military advantage sought. That point is crucial.

I come to my first question. During the Second World War, anywhere between 600,000 and 1 million civilians died in the siege of Leningrad, nearly all from starvation. If that siege could have been prevented or even truncated by the use of antipersonnel landmines and/or cluster weapons, would their use have been justified, or should the appalling death toll have been allowed to continue?

My second question is: if we were faced on our border with an aggressive, unprincipled and ruthless foe determined upon destruction and subjugation, and the use of mines and/or cluster weapons would be pivotal in deterring or defending against such a foe, would we be right to use them or should we allow our infrastructure to be destroyed, our civilians to be killed and our children to be kidnapped? Perhaps certitude is easier and more comfortable the further removed one is from the direct threat.

In thinking about the safety of civilians in war, it is crucial to weigh all the factors and to search for a balanced judgment in line with the law of armed conflict. Absolute prohibitions do not lend themselves to such weighing and judging, especially when they are applied only to the defendant.

Finally, the best way to ensure the safety of civilians is to deter aggressors from attacking in the first place. The more risk we take with deterrence, the more we risk civilian as well as military lives.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, for setting out this important matter so clearly and to other noble Lords for their very evident expertise in this area.

The attempt to regulate behaviour in times of conflict is a very old one. In classical antiquity, war without good cause risked religious pollution and divine disfavour. Your Lordships may think this did little to inhibit it. The Church’s later attempts to restrain violence in Europe developed at the most serious level into the just war theory, with its assigning of the monopoly of force to the state, a restricted list of circumstances where it might apply, and ideas of proportionality and protection of non-combatants.

At its root was the idea that violence is evil, but that, when faced with violence, force may be used, although with restraint. Men and women trained for war and arms deployed for their use have the most fearful capacity. Hence, in ancient doctrine and in modern treaties, we must place limits. I appreciate that the position of the countries named is greatly more exposed to threat than that of the United Kingdom currently, but the virtue and the impact of restraint and regulation are not felt when they are not needed. They are experienced when the pressure is upon us to take fearful measures, yet we persist in upholding the norms we have pledged to observe. That is the intent of these treaties, such as that on antipersonnel landmines and cluster munitions. They have much to commend them.

My Lords, I too commend the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, for bringing this debate and for his own prescience in the matter, notably last year in the debate here on the SDR, when he foresaw that the embattled democracies of eastern Europe might have to withdraw from the landmines treaty and cluster munitions convention.

I also commend my noble friend Lord Attlee, who will be much missed in this place, for his prescience on the matter. But there is also a particular piquancy in his intervention today, because it is 90 years since the election of his grandfather, Clement Attlee, as leader of the Labour Party. That is of direct relevance to our deliberations today, because of course “Citizen Clem” displaced the ageing pacifist George Lansbury. We all remember Ernest Bevin as leader of the TGWU and his famous remark about Lansbury hawking his conscience. It is a source of great pleasure to me that the Labour Party is now the party of Attlee and Bevin when it comes to nuclear weapons and the broader defence of our kingdom.

Unfortunately, the ghost of Lansbury is still present in too many of Labour’s deliberations when it comes to landmines and cluster munitions, and I very much hope that that will change. I was sorry that last year the Minister, in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, was slightly hawking her conscience as well in reproaching the Lithuanian Government for their wish to withdraw from the convention. I was sorry about that, but I welcome that in recent days—because I know that this is a work in progress—the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, responded to the noble Lord, Lord Spellar, in a Written Parliamentary Answer that the Government were indeed going to acknowledge the sovereign right of sovereign Governments to come to their own decisions, and I hope that that progress will indeed be maintained.

I have two particular questions for the Minister.

My Lords—

Just very quickly—I will narrow it down to one, if the noble Baroness will bear with me.