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Court Martial Judgment

My Lords, I thank the noble and gallant Lord for the points he has made because it is essential for us to stress that, from the point of view of the Armed Forces themselves, it is vitally important that justice is seen to be done. He also made an excellent point about the length of time that this case has taken and we must look at that. The investigation took 13 months. I have spoken already about the difficult circumstances under which the investigations were undertaken, by the nature of the operations themselves. My understanding is that the work that had to be done relating to the forensic evidence alone took five months to complete. We need to look at what can be done to shorten this time-scale. The uncertainty under which everyone is put contributes to the concern generally relating to this type of situation. It is something we are looking at as part of the review.