Contribution
My Lords, I will very briefly talk to my Amendments 10 and 15. When any Administration shift from the original arguments which justified their policy to a new set of arguments, you know that they are moving from evidence-based policy to policy-based evidence. That seems to be what is happening here.
When the original Statement was made about this treaty on 22 May, the Defence Minister in the other place said that if we did not have this treaty, within weeks we would face a binding legal judgment which would in due course render the base inoperable. That was implicitly based on the case before the International Court of Justice, but no mention was made that that ruling was purely advisory, not binding. No mention was made that it was based on General Assembly resolutions, which themselves are not binding and had never been ratified by the Security Council, where, in any case, we have a veto. There was no mention that when we signed up to the ICJ, we specifically precluded it from hearing or being bound by anything relating to disputes between the UK and Commonwealth members, and that subsequently, in 2012, the Cameron Government had tightened that by saying it should be not just present Commonwealth members but present or past Commonwealth members, just in case Mauritius should leave the Commonwealth to pursue its case.
When we mentioned these things, the Government did not say, “Oh yes, you’re quite right: we should have mentioned this earlier”. They simply shifted to talking about the possibility of tribunals in other fora, above all the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—but that convention cannot address sovereignty. In Committee, the Minister mentioned that in a dispute between Mauritius and the Maldives, in which Britain was not represented, the tribunal assumed on the basis of the ICJ treaty that the boundaries of Mauritius should include Chagos and ruled on that basis. But we have the right in any future dispute that involves us to be represented; above all, we have the right to invoke, I think, amendment 238, which precludes military matters. The Diego Garcia base is above all a military matter. So I do not see where any binding legal judgment could come from, which is why I say that this should not come into force until we see that there is a binding ruling from some international body. If it is going to happen within weeks, that is not going to delay the whole matter very much.
The second issue, which is dealt with in my second amendment, is the reference to any ruling—by whichever international body it is—effectively rendering the base inoperable. When we press on that, we are told that it would mean that countries that supply the base and provide facilities for the base would be able to withdraw those facilities, which in some way would render it inoperable. As to what these facilities are, I presume they get food from neighbouring countries in boats—but nothing much has changed. If countries wished effectively to impose an embargo on the Diego Garcia base, with or without an international resolution from the ICJ or any other tribunal, they could do so. If that would render the base inoperable, the base is much weaker than we thought; and, if they cannot do so, surely there is nothing much to worry about on whether there is a legal ruling.
I do not want to go on at length because I know that noble Lords want to get on to the important business of expressing their views in the Lobbies. But the fundamental basis of this whole treaty has shifted, like the Goodwin Sands—and, like sinking sands everywhere, when they shift, they swallow you up. The Government’s rationale for this whole Bill has been swallowed up by their refusal to just wait and see whether some tribunal would come up with some ruling which would, in some very strange way, render the base inoperable. I find that imaginary but, if it is possible, let us suck it and see.