Lord Lilley (Con)

My Lords, I want primarily—perhaps later—to talk about my Amendments 20Q and 20U, but I will say something about my noble friend Lord Hannan’s Amendment 20L to emphasise one particular precedent he mentioned in passing but seems the most compelling and dangerous. Indeed, in line with the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, I have been rather cautious about discussing this because I did not want to put ideas into people’s heads, but, for two reasons, I will go ahead and talk about it now. First, there is no better way to keep a secret than to pronounce it in the House of Lords; and secondly, as my noble friend Lord Hannan said, there are lawyers in every country looking to see whether this is a precedent that they could use to right some past wrong or to change some past circumstance which they would like changed. The most compelling comparison is between what we are doing now and the reasons given for doing it and the independence of Cyprus, where we severed off the sovereign bases. They were part of a whole. The territorial integrity of Cyprus was divided between the sovereign bases and the rest. That is exactly what we are accused of doing in the case of the Chagos Islands. It is actually much more true in the case of Cyprus than in that of the Chagos Islands, because Cyprus was always governed as one unit by us whereas the Chagos Islands had separate laws, even if they were transmitted from somebody resident in Mauritius. Therefore, if we are saying that there is compelling reason for us to say we cannot separate the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, of which it has never been part, then surely there are compelling reasons why we should never have separated the sovereign base territories from the rest of Cyprus. Those bases are hugely important. They played a role time and again in recent disputes and interventions, and in the prospect of interventions in the Middle East. We have been able to help fly from them and intercept missiles from Iran coming towards Israel. In previous conflicts, we used the bases there. They of value not only to us but to the whole of NATO. If we put them at risk by saying to the world that we have no right to have separated them then we would be doing something very foolish. The only difference I can think of—I am offering a solution to this dilemma, because I do not want the issue of the sovereign bases to be opened up in a dangerous way—is that the decisions in Cyprus were taken before the United Nations General Assembly resolution on which the advisory opinion of the ICJ was based, and therefore it did not apply to them. Of course, advisory opinions are not actually binding—they are wrongly taken as being binding but they are not—but do they apply retrospectively? In many cases when courts rule, they say, “This has always been the case; we’ve only just now ruled it”. I would like to hear how the Minister proposes to defend the sovereign bases in Cyprus from this precedent. She is obviously not doing this willingly; she is obviously unwilling and she is a wonderful Minister, but she has been given a tough job to do. I would like to hear some justification for this. I do not know whether the precedent in Committee allows me to sit down now and stand up later to deal with my amendments, but assuming I can do that, I will.