Diplomatic Immunity (Revision and Interpretation) (Hansard, 22 May 1984)

§ Mr. Greville Janner (Leicester, West)
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the initiation by the United Kingdom of a revision of the Vienna Convention; to interpret the Convention in connection with the scrutiny of diplomatic bags; and for related purposes.
The Bill arises from the tragedy, outrage and humiliation of recent events at the Libyan people's bureau leading up to, including and following the murder of an innocent policewoman with a weapon that was almost certainly imported into this country in a diplomatic bag, followed by the export of the murder weapon by the same means together with the export of the murderer, all under the dirtied and dishonoured cloak of diplomatic immunity. This is the latest event in the series of awful murders that have brought blood on to our streets and which have resulted from the violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Vienna convention.
The Bill contains three proposals. First, the Government should be required on behalf of the United Kingdom to initiate a revision of the Vienna convention. Secondly, the convention should, in its proper interpretation and according to our law, permit the scanning of diplomatic bags by electronic means. Thirdly, the lists of diplomats and those of their staff who have the benefit of diplomatic immunity should be properly culled.
I believe that the need for revision of the convention is common ground in the House, and the Government have undertaken to put such a revision under way insofar as they are able. There is, however, very little chance of the diplomatic communities of the world being prepared to accept the need for such a revision, given that those communities include the very states which have been importing weapons, guns, bullets and bombs into this country in diplomatic bags—largely Arab countries in the middle east. The chances of such acceptance are made even smaller by the fact that the Libyans, who were concerned in this matter and with whom we no longer have diplomatic relations, declined to sign that part of the Vienna convention concerned with diplomatic bags. We must by all means try to have the convention revised, but if that is to happen within the lifetime of hon. Members now in the House they will have to live a very long time indeed.

§ Mr. Geoffrey Lofthouse (Pontefract and Castleford)
The hon. Member for Northampton, North (Mr. Marlow) is reading a newspaper.

§ Mr. Janner
That is no more than I expect of the hon. Member.
We must seek, therefore, to declare that the law is as I believe it to be. On this occasion, I find myself in the surprising company of Lord Denning. As the Government have seen fit to rely on his judgments on many previous occasions, I hope that they will see the correctness of the view that he stated last week in another place when he said that on a correct interpretation of article 27 of the Vienna convention it would have been possible and right for Her Majesty's Government to have prevented the gun used for the killing of the policewoman from coming into the country in a diplomatic bag and to have prevented it from going out in that way.
Article 27 says: 853 The diplomatic bag shall not be opened or detained and: The packages constituting the diplomatic bag must bear visible external marks of their character and may contain only diplomatic documents or articles intended for official use. The Libyans might well maintain that bombs and guns are intended for official use, but in ordinary, decent diplomatic parlance and usage the diplomatic bag is for proper purposes and not for those which are obscene and lethal.
In those circumstances there is no reason why the Government should not have arranged for the bags to be scanned, why the people who owned the bags should not have been invited to remove the articles concerned, or why the bags should not have been returned whence they came. There was no need for the bags to be detained, and they should certainly not have been opened. If Lord Denning is correct—I believe that he is—there is no reason why what I suggested should not have been done. He said: It seems to me that that provision does not prevent proper steps being taken to discover it, whether by scanning or whatever else. He is referring to the diplomatic bag and whether it contains narcotics, bombs or the like. He continued: They need not actually open the hag these days. By scanning and other scientific means they can well see things."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 16 May 1984; Vol. 451, c. 1455.]
The second part of the Bill would be a declaration that under the proper interpretation of the convention about the scrutiny of diplomatic bags, the Government would have been entitled so to act and could so act in future. That declaration would concern only our law, and would not involve the almost impossible task of inducing other nations to agree to amend the Vienna convention.
There are about 5,000 diplomats in the United Kingdom, most of whom are extremely welcome. They do a difficult and often necessarily dangerous job. We are glad to have them in our midst, but the Government should take great care to ensure that those who claim to have diplomatic immunity are properly called diplomats, their staff and families, and are not terrorists in disguise. They must be on the list. The third and final part of the Bill raises that point, that is, that the list should be properly scanned and culled.
I ask the House to give leave to introduce this Bill as a signal of its discontent about the state of the law of international immunity, of its determination to insist that the Government seek revision of the Vienna convention, and, meanwhile, its outrage at the lack of robust action in that terrible and disastrous event that occurred recently at the so-called Libyan people's bureau.