---

Armed Forces Bill

My Lords, this is an important matter, so I will speak to it in some detail. Amendment No. 31 seeks to prevent civilians who are under 18 being tried before a court martial. As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, said, on24 October the European Court of Human Rights gave its judgment in the case of Martin. We need to be clear what it decided. As we have heard, the case was about the son of a serviceman who was tried by court martial in 1995 for the murder of a civilian in Germany. The court martial was subject to the same objections as were found to exist in the Findlay case in 1996, and which were remedied by the Armed Forces Act 1996. So it is no surprise that the European court also decided in Martin that the court martial was not compliant. The court did not decide that courts martial should not try civilians or that they should not try civilian juveniles, but it stated the important principle that a military jurisdiction should only be exercised over civilians if there are ““compelling reasons”” to do so. In Martin, there was the possibility of civilian trial in the UK, because the charge was murder. The European court did not decide whether there had been compelling reasons for a court-martial trial. It did not need to, because, as I have said, it decided the case on the basis that the court martial was not compliant. It did not go into what it thought would be compelling reasons. In the Martin case, the reasons for court-martial trial were mainly to do with the availability of witnesses, most of whom were German. But there were other factors.