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Armed Forces Bill

Members of the Committee will appreciate from the speeches I made yesterday that I am against this amendment. An opportunity is being lost completely to restructure the court martial system. We ought to have a system of justice that is concerned with convicting those who are guilty and protecting those who are innocent. Many of the reforms contained in this Bill—some of which are very good—are coloured by the past. Service traditions come into it, as does what happened 50 or 100 years ago. We in this House are used to dealing every year with a criminal justice Bill of one sort or another whereby the procedures and practices of the criminal courts are constantly reviewed and updated in the light of changing circumstances. However, every change that is extracted in the court martial system is, as I said yesterday at some length, the result of trips to the European Court at Strasbourg to point out on more than one occasion that the court martial system is not consonant with the covenant. Instead of looking at the situation as a whole, as an entity, we are simply tweaking at the edges. One thinks of the enormous reforms of the civil courts of this country by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the revisions that have gone on under him. On the civil side, courts are being updated and the whole system is looked at. Here, we are back to service rivalry: it is impossible for officers in the RAF to understand a fight between two soldiers, or for Army officers to understand that flying at 100 feet is dangerous. That is ridiculous. The purpose of the Bill is to bring the services together into a whole. It ought to be possible to widen the panel by drawing members from all the services, rather than simply sticking to the service to which the particular defendant belongs. I am against this amendment.