Mark RonHon RON MARK (Minister of Defence): Thank you Madam Chair. Well I rise take a short call just to indicate that New Zealand First of course will be supporting the passage of this and supporting the report back by the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee. I want to firstly congratulate the select committee again ably led by Simon O'Connor from the National Party team who always seems to do a sterling job in this area. I recognise the other members of the team who worked alongside him to produce the report that we have—very short very brief and simply recommends that the War Crimes Amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court proceed. I know that in the speeches that are going to be heard this evening on this very short report back there is going to be a little bit of repetition. I think it's probably with that in mind acknowledging that the detail of the bill has already been well explored and it's going to be rotary-hoed even further I ask us to just remind ourselves where this has come from.I think we often hear of cases of atrocities that are being committed in different parts of the world in conflicts and we sometimes forget where treaties such as this had their genesis. I think it's worth mentioning that the establishment of an international tribunal to judge political leaders accused of international crimes was first actually proposed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 following the First World War. It's interesting that this matter was addressed further by the League of Nations the forerunner to the United Nations in 1937. There were long periods of discussion and debate around the need for the establishment of a permanent international court to try acts of international terrorism and what we call today crimes against humanity and that went on for quite some time. It's interesting that there was actually at that time a convention signed by 13 States—only 13—but none ratified it and the convention never entered into force. Into the Second World War and then post the Second World War it was the Allied powers who established two different ad hoc tribunals and one was to prosecute the Nazis for war crimes—what we again would call crimes against humanity. Then I think there was the International Military Tribunal which sat at Nuremberg. Then there was the International Military Tribunal for the Far East which sat in Tokyo and prosecuted Japanese leaders for war crimes committed in the Pacific.In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly finally recognised the need for a permanent international court to deal with atrocities of this nature. I think at the request to the General Assembly we had the International Law Commission draft two statutes by the early 1950s and these were shelved during the Cold War for obvious reasons when the world could not get agreement on much at that time. The international environment for such a treaty or such a decision was just simply politically unrealistic and unable to find agreement. There was still clearly a lot more debate after that and there were a couple of proponents who continued to fight the fight for a feasible International Criminal Court and that finally went through in 1970. I think in 1971 we saw the foundation for the establishment of an International Criminal Court—and that led us to 1989. Again—interesting—it was promoted by the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago on the back of what they were struggling to deal with through the illegal drug trade. The rest of it's pretty much history and if you go forward from there to almost our most recent past we can see the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia which was created in 1993 in response to those just—well those large-scale atrocities that were committed in the Yugoslav wars. Then of course we had the crimes that were committed in Rwanda as well in 1994 in what was described as the Rwandan genocide.The need for the Rome Statute and the need for New Zealand to ratify the international treaty examination on war crimes is pretty clear. We've talked about some of the matters that it's going to specifically deal with—use of poison or poisonous weapons. Sadly we continue to see in conflicts in places such as Syria the continued use of these weapons. It deals specifically with asphyxiating poisonous or other gases. Again we are seeing the use of these horrific weapons against humanity and very often we see unfortunately that the innocent—women and children—are very often those who fall victim to these atrocities.The conversation around expanding bullets is quite interesting because anyone who knows anything about firearms knows that whilst the military is prohibited from using expanding bullets the police are not. Expanding bullets for those who don't know them—they're often referred to as dumdums—they're used to cause the maximum harm possible. So a limb wound—which might using a copper-coated steel-jacketed round cause a penetration and a large exit wound—with a dumdum produces quite horrific wounds and can through the shock in a limb actually cause death. These were considered inhumane and contravene the Geneva Convention in so far as our military is concerned but there are technical reasons as to why police forces all over the world including our own are not prohibited from using them.It's interesting—there's a lot of conversation right now about military-style semi-automatics and a lot of conversation about who should have them and use them. I do sometimes ponder the Bushmaster 556 which the police use. It doesn't use a hollow point; it doesn't use an expanding-headed bullet round; it doesn't use a dumdum. But the fact that it can punch through a person and through the next wall and through the next wall after that and potentially hit kill maim or injure someone else is something that military people are very aware of cognisant of and we often hold our breath when we see these weapons being used in urban areas by police forces. The advantage of an expanding round is that it will punch and stop. It does not have the ability because of what happens to the head of the round to continue and to penetrate walls beyond. There are a specific type of expanding round that counter-terrorist units and air marshals will use in aircraft in the hope that it doesn't penetrate the fuselage. So there are reasons why police forces around the world continue to use these rounds and why it's accepted that they won't be covered by this but it does beg the question: if it's inhumane for the military to use why are the police using them? There are technical reasons as to why they shouldn't but that doesn't detract from the fact that these rounds produce horrific wounds and people should know that. Thank you.