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 Russia has also withdrawn from the open skies treaty.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 In 2023, Russia rescinded its ratification—as it put it—of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.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.