---

Armed Forces Bill

True, but I want to deal with issues that we need to view as distinct segments. One concerns whether there should be an offence that relates to the disobeying of orders to serve in what is defined in the Bill as"““the occupation of a foreign country or territory.””" The point was made that it is not possible for such an occupation or war to be illegal if the Government of the day have made the democratic decision that it is a legal and justifiable war, but that is deeply wrong. International law and the United Nations and its conventions define the distinction between the circumstances in which a war is unavoidable and the circumstances in which a country has the right to defend itself. But it is not true that any Parliament in any country can make a war legal, and that includes our own Parliament, just because it decides that it should be legal. In the case of the Serbian Parliament’s decisions in respect of the war on Bosnia, we said consistently that we did not care that the Serbian Parliament had decided that it was a legal war for its own purposes; that was not the view of the international community. It is deeply dangerous for any Parliament to go down a path that says that if it decides that a war is legal, that makes it legal. That is not the framework set by the international community on the legality of international wars after the second world war.