George Robertson, the Defence Secretary, yesterday announced an immediate and total ban on the use of anti-personnel landmines by British forces as the Government ratified an international convention outlawing the indiscriminate weapon estimated to kill or maim 2,000 people a month.
The government decided earlier this month to bow to intense public pressure and rush through a Landmines Act in time for the first anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, Princess of Wales, who championed the campaign against the weapon.
Until yesterday, a loophole allowed ministers to deploy mines in ‘exceptional circumstances’.
‘The most professional army in the world now has said that this is not a system that is morally correct or militarily useful,’ Mr Robertson said.
The largely symbolic decision - a British moratorium on the use of mines has been in place for a year - was welcomed by the British Red Cross and the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), the mine clearance organisation. Lou McGrath, director of MAG, said Britain had taken a moral stand of which it should be proud.
However, Mr McGrath said a significant loophole remained. British troops working with Nato would still be able to help others lay mines. The United States has said it will not sign the Ottawa Convention, which prohibits use of land mines, until 2006 and then not without conditions. The US and Turkey are the only Nato countries which have not signed the convention.
Responding to opposition criticism that the loophole was in breach of the Ottawa Convention, or at least its intention, Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, told the Commons on July 10 that it would ‘protect British troops from being criminalised by the action of American troops who may be taking part in the same operation’.
Yesterday, junior foreign minister, Baroness Symons, told peers that, in the Government’s view, the Ottawa Convention did not prevent British troops working with other countries’ forces that were using landmines.
‘The mere participation in the planning or execution of operations, exercises or other military activity by the UK’s armed forces . . . in combination with the armed forces of states not party to the Ottawa Convention, which engage in activity that is prohibited under the convention, is not, by itself, assistance, encouragement or inducement,’ she said.
The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell, described Mr Robertson’s announcement as ‘yet another case of news management for political advantage’.
