Clause 1 - The ICC and the ICC Statute
International Criminal Court Bill [Lords]
4:45 pm
Mr John Battle (Minister of State, Foreign & Commonwealth Office; Leeds West, Labour)
I shall start by responding to several of the detailed points that have been raised. I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Harborough, who said that the court is to be set up internationally by statute, that we cannot change that statute because we have agreed to it, that we are trying to align our position so that we can be signatories to it, and that we are therefore somewhat hamstrung. It is not as if we were starting out, through primary legislation, to construct our own court here in Britain. That was a fair way of putting it. The question then is whether our deliberations and decisions will change what we do in Britain anyway. We would argue that it will not and cannot, and that any change would have to come before Parliament in any event. That is the reassurance that we shall try to give to Opposition Members.
Many of the comments by the hon. Member for Reigate suggested that he overestimates the scope of the court. This is not the Bill to implement the Geneva convention. To put it crudely, it is not the Bill to ban war and resolve all world conflicts. It is quite limited in its scope. We should understand that we are setting up a court, through international agreement, to try people for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and we have to define what those crimes are. The court is not retrospective—it is intended not to sort out past and current conflicts, but to deal with people who are brought before it in future.
The hon. and learned Member for Harborough asked me, in a rather grandiloquent manner, what the sovereign's view was. I can tell him the Government's view: we have no problem at all with article 8.2(b)(viii) of the statute, which concerns the transfer of the civilian population of an occupying power into the territory that it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or without the territory. That is not a new concept; it appears in the context of other international treaties. Article 49 of the fourth Geneva convention of 1949 prohibits transfers by an occupying power of its civilian population into occupied territory, and the deportation or transfer of the population of the occupied territory. We have been party to that convention without any difficulty for 40 years, and there should be no going back on that now.
We are also party to the first additional protocol to the Geneva convention, dating from 1997, of which article 85.4(a) uses almost identical language to that of the Rome statute in recognising such transfers to be a grave breach of the Geneva convention. We have prayed in aid the Geneva Conventions (Amendment) Act 1995, which was passed by the previous Government with our support; there was unanimity about that. When that Government did good things, as they did on a few occasions, it was right to support them.
The British courts already have universal jurisdiction over such crimes, whenever and wherever they are committed. It would be pretty odd if we now decided to deny to the International Criminal Court jurisdiction that our courts already have. That position would be completely incongruous, which is why I do not think that the amendment is necessary. The crime, like those in the statute, was further elaborated in the ``Elements of Crimes'' documents prepared by the preparatory commission for the ICC in June last year. The elements of article 8.2(b)(viii), which were the subject of extensive negotiation, do not include the notion that only forced transfers are illegal. Those elements of crimes were adopted by consensus between the states participating in the preparatory commission—a consensus that included the United Kingdom. It also included Israel and the United States of America, which was welcomed. The main point of building the institution is to get the court off the ground. I hope that it was a slip of the tongue rather than anything else when the hon. Members for Chesham and Amersham and for Reigate stated that Israel had not signed the statute. Israel has signed it.