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Armed Forces Personnel

The Minister shakes his head. Why did the Government contest the case? Why did the Government’s QC go into the court and contest the international applicability of the Human Rights Act? That was what was set down in the Act of Parliament. The Act does not apply British law internationally; that is read, by implication, directly from the convention. This puts our armed servicemen and women in an increasingly invidious position. I sat on the Delegated Legislation Committee that this week dealt with the orders arising from the Armed Forces Discipline Acts. Our armed servicemen have to operate in a much more complicated legal environment. There has to be a limit, because I gather from the Joint Services Command and Staff College at Shrivenham that we now have an 11th principle of warfare, which servicemen have to learn—legitimacy. Effectively, we are asking our armed servicemen to question the orders they are given, in case they are being given an illegal order. The two soldiers who refused to be deployed to Iraq in 2003 were never court-martialled, because the Government did not want to test the legality of their refusal to deploy. I believe this is undermining the chain of command on which our armed servicemen depend. Far more preferable would be a system of armed forces discipline that rested on comprehensive Acts of Parliament that were not internationally justiciable, either by the convention on human rights or by the International Criminal Court. If we in the House can satisfy ourselves that our armed servicemen are acting legitimately and according to law, what business is it of a judge from another nationality who knows nothing about the national interests at stake in a military operation? I think that is why the United States refuses to sign up to the International Criminal Court. It is why the French Government opted out their military from the convention on human rights. I think that is the position that we should have for our own armed servicemen, so that when they face a military tribunal and are exonerated, they do not face the double jeopardy that was suffered by Trooper Williams, who was exonerated by his commanding officer but subsequently prosecuted by another court, only to be exonerated again; or the Parachute Regiment men who came back from Iraq and were acquitted in a court of law after they had already been acquitted by their commanding officers. I think we owe our armed service men a clear framework of discipline and procedure, which these international arrangements do not give them.