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Armed Forces Bill

Can the Minister give us any information about the extent to which there have been over some period, which it might be convenient for him to select, successful appeals on sentence to the courts martial appeal court? It also occurs to me that in the civil system of criminal courts, if we can talk about such a system, the president of the court is the one who sentences, in the sense that the judge is regarded as being in charge of the court during the whole process, although the jury determines guilt or innocence under his direction. In the military situation, the president of the court is in effect the foreman of the jury, if we look to the civil system for comparison. I can see the difficulty that some may have in thinking that someone who is not the president of the court should ultimately determine the court’s decision on the matter of sentence. That may be rather a superficial way of looking at the matter, but it is the way in which the courts martial are set up at the moment, and I do not think that the Bill intends to change that aspect of the courts martial system.