Lord Callanan (Con)

My Lords, throughout our debates on the Bill, we have had, as the Minister said, many robust exchanges, and the Bill will go to the other place with four amendments passed by your Lordships’ House. However, it has become increasingly clear throughout those debates that this deal fails even on the terms set out for it by its ministerial proponents. They have told us repeatedly that we need this deal to provide legal certainty—“Look at the advisory opinion by the ICJ”, they tell us. We are told that if we do not give away the islands then all sorts of unpleasant judgments might follow in various unspecified fora. My noble friend Lord Lilley has been forensic in questioning the Government on exactly where these adverse rulings might emanate, given that the ICJ itself would surely be excluded from any such decisions and that disputes involving the UK and Commonwealth countries were specifically excluded from its mandate when we first acceded to it. We have heard various mutterings about the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and even the International Telecommunication Union, but no definitive response. Therefore, we have an advisory ICJ opinion, from a panel containing Russian and Chinese judge—those doughty campaigners for the concept of international law, seemingly applying to everyone except themselves—and, with great seriousness, Ministers tell us that this opinion must be respected. However, we now have an additional opinion from another UN body: the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which, ironically, contains Mauritius as a member. A few weeks ago, this committee published a formal decision calling for the suspension of treaty ratification. As far as I am aware, the Foreign Office has ignored it and is yet to even comment on the ruling. So we have two diametrically opposed opinions from different UN bodies, one of which is to be obeyed without hesitation while the other, apparently, is to be completely ignored. Ministers then tell us that they have fully secured the future of the Diego Garcia base, which will be able to continue operations exactly as before. However, they have manifestly failed to explain how that can possibly be the case when Mauritius is a signatory to the Pelindaba treaty which prohibits the placing of any nuclear weapons on any African territory, which Diego Garcia would become under this deal. Nobody has been asking Ministers to disclose secret defence information, but we know from openly published sources that the base has been utilised for the transportation of nuclear weapons on planes and submarines. How can that possibly be compatible with Mauritius’s obligations under the Pelindaba treaty? The agreement is completely silent on this matter. Even in the face of robust questioning from my noble friend Lady Goldie, a former Defence Minister, we have received no ministerial answers. If base operation is to continue unhindered, as Ministers tell us it will, we can only assume there exists some kind of secret agreement along the lines of the old disgraced US policy on gays in the military: don’t ask and don’t tell. The current Mauritian Government might play along with this fiction, but what about any future Mauritian Governments? What about all the other African signatories to the treaty? Any one of them could also take action in the international courts to force Mauritius to abide by its treaty obligations. For an agreement supposedly predicated on providing both military and legal certainty, it seems destined to do the exact opposite.