Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I appreciate that.

The arms industry kills more than the drugs industry, yet we refuse to take the necessary steps to address this. There are at least 100 million small arms floating around the Great Lakes area, most of which were made either in the United States or Europe. The arms industry is the core determinant of what is ethical. Making money out of other people's conflicts is probably the most unethical thing one can do. Now that we are rich and in a position to take on board ethical considerations, we have backed away from doing so.

I could elaborate on other ethical issues. Europe is in the disgraceful position of being softer on Burma than the United State because France and Britain do not want to upset their precious investments in Burma. We could refer to Zimbabwe, regarding which the Minister was correctly concerned about the locking up of the Opposition leader in Zimbabwe. We could refer to Palestine also. There are between 20 and 40 Members of the Palestinian Parliament in jail in Israel but nobody talks about this.

We could talk about Guantanamo Bay and the fact that the civilian lawyer of the first prisoner who pleaded guilty, who has now gone to Australia, refused to serve in the show trial in Guantanamo because he was asked to agree in advance to be bound by rules that had not yet been written. We have tied ourselves to a country that believes in brutal warfare, which has suppressed human rights at home and which is now determined to go through a series of show trials in Guantanamo that will be even less public and accountable than the sorts of practices carried out in the Soviet Union at the height of Stalinism.