Oliver Miles

The House of Lords will this afternoon be looking at the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. Among the sections they’re likely to scrutinise are those that deal with the question of universal jurisdiction, the principle according to which a state has the right to arrest and prosecute people accused of committing crimes against humanity outside its borders. Last year the former (and probable future) Israeli foreign minister Dzipi Livni abandoned a visit to Britain because she might be charged with war crimes over ‘Operation Cast Lead’. William Hague told the Israelis that the law would be changed. A foreign office spokesman said that this would not reflect a change in the law regarding universal jurisdiction, but would prevent interest groups misusing the law in ways that could damage Britain's foreign relations.

The release of Abd al Basit al-Megrahi, convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds in 2009 continues to attract ‘revelations’ in the media, the latest of them in the Telegraph and Vanity Fair.

The CIA announced yesterday that it has set up a task force with a rude acronym to assess the damage caused by WikiLeaks. So far, more trouble seems to have been caused by the bare fact of the leak, and the sheer scale of it, than by the content of any of the published cables.

For the most part we see able, professional diplomats doing their best to understand and report on the places where they’re stationed, as anyone familiar with the State Department would expect. Those I have looked at (mostly from or concerning the Middle East) are classified up to ‘secret’, which is supposed to mean the information in them would cause ‘grave damage’ to national security if made public. One lesson is that over-classification, which is a form of bad security, is even more prevalent in the State Department today than it was in the British diplomatic service when I served in it.

The sloppy administration of the general election – long queues at polling stations, voters locked out, not enough ballot papers – has rightly caused outrage among those affected and may yet cause legal or other problems. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise. I used to assume that the system in the UK was relatively clean and efficient. Of course, no one is perfect, and every election is followed by police investigations into dirty work of one kind or another. Before election day this time I counted six press reports of police investigations, most but not all concerned with postal votes, once described by a judge as ‘an invitation to fraud’. But I began to look at our system more sceptically after being an official observer at five elections in states of the former Soviet Union. I was part of a team run by the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, the members of which agreed in 1990 that it would be a good idea to observe each other's elections.

Hillary Clinton had a meeting with Tony Blair on 11 February in his capacity as Middle East envoy of the 'Quartet', the group which comprises the US, the EU, Russia and the UN. She said Blair would 'intensify' his partnership with Senator George Mitchell, the US special envoy to the Middle East, to develop a future Palestinian state. Blair spoke of 'bottom-up change' and welcomed progress made in the West Bank. All this raises several interesting questions.