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Armed Forces Personnel

I agree that the Geneva convention sets out an important architecture, but let me give an example to illustrate my point. We were once running an internment camp—not a detention facility—in Iraq because that is what was required. That was legitimate and part of the UN mandate. It was legitimised, but it had to be reviewed from time to time and the authority to run it had to be agreed with the new Iraqi Government following an exchange of letters and all the things that go with UN activities. Otherwise, our military personnel, from Colchester and elsewhere, who were running the camp, which was not anything like Guantanamo Bay, needed to know that they were secure in what they were doing. They now serve alongside others, more often than not in coalition. The Americans are not signatories to the International Criminal Court, but the United Kingdom is. Often there are people on the ground in a foreign place with some sort of architecture of legitimacy between the Government who have asked them to go, or the United Nations, and individually they may well find that domestic and international law are different from one another. That issue needs to be considered. At the moment we put in place mechanisms that we believe protect our individuals who are on the ground, but they are citizens serving abroad. There is a relationship between international and domestic law that we need to be very careful about, and the subject will need debate, because I see operational service personnel second-guessing their decisions. Rather than doing what they would normally do, they send it back up just to make sure. The window of opportunity is gone. I could give a practical example of that relating to the current problem of piracy in the Gulf, but I am not allowed to. The person concerned did not do wrong; they did right in order to protect themselves. What we must have in place is a decision-making process that enables us to take all those things to account with the speed that they need to be taken into account so that the decision-making process does not disadvantage the individual when they do the job that they are required to do it, not later after some gang of lawyers have assessed whether it is right or wrong. We must celebrate all those who have served, all those who do serve, and all those who will serve, but we must be careful how we make organisational changes to do the things we wish to do.