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Armed Forces Bill

I have listened carefully to the points made on the Floor of this House and my comments on Amendments Nos. 62 and 63 will be brief, in the interests of making progress. I was taken by a number of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, in respect of juveniles, and those points were emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Borrie. I shall go away and reflect on these matters, in so far as they apply to juveniles, and come back to the noble Lord. I believe that I have to be more robust on Amendment No. 63 because, as we have heard, it goes to the heart of the Bill. I have already spoken to the two key principles that we believe underpin what we are trying to achieve in this very important Bill for our Armed Forces in having a separate and comprehensive system of military justice. As I understand it, this amendment seeks to permit service personnel and civilians who are subject to service discipline to elect trial before civilian courts in the United Kingdom where those civilian courts have extra-territorial jurisdiction. I believe that that would significantly undermine those key principles; it would rip the heart out of the Bill and have a significantly detrimental effect on its standing. I therefore ask the noble Lord not to press that amendment. I should also like to make a point relating to personnel, whether they are civilians acting in arms, as the noble Lord opposite has just said, or whether they are taking part in operational or non-operational activities. In our modern environment, the types of operations that our forces undergo change very rapidly in a short space of time and can therefore be hard to define as active service in a warlike situation. We are seeing so-called ““three-block”” operations, where the situation can change extremely rapidly. Therefore, we do not believe that it would be helpful to make this distinction, as it would be impractical in defining active service or operational or non-operational theatre. I would have real difficulty with such a distinction.