Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 20th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the advisory board of the British Institute of Human Rights. I speak as someone who became aware of the conduct and, especially, the high reputation of our Armed Forces overseas in the actual areas where they operated when I was involved in international development. We are fortunate in the high standards of our Armed Forces and can be rightly proud of them.

That is the main reason why I find parts of the Bill distressing and inappropriate. The level of prosecutions hitherto has been very low. There has not been victimisation of soldiers through due process. A recent freedom of information request by the Minority Rights Group found that from all operations in Iraq, from 2003 to the present, there was only one prosecution under the ICC Act and in the lesser category of offences alleged by members of the public there were only five prosecutions. In Afghanistan from 2001 to the present—some 20 years—there were only nine convictions. This is hardly a picture of soldiers needing supralegal protection, even if it were desirable. For that matter, since the Bill deals only with prosecutions, it would not prevent vexatious litigation in the course of investigations, and even those cases have been speedily thrown out under our current legislation.

Yet the Bill appears to assume that very serious crimes may be committed by service personnel and proposes to reduce substantially their openness to prosecution, even in cases of torture, war crimes and genocide, after only five years. As a signatory to the UN convention against torture the UK has always repudiated torture, and freedom from torture is the only absolute unqualified right in the whole armoury of human rights. It would tarnish our reputation indelibly to allow it tacitly in any circumstances. That is not the only international standard that the Bill breaches—those which by definition cannot be set aside, not excluding the law of armed conflict itself. The result will be that our servicemen, in the unlikely event that there is such an allegation against them, will, as has been said very widely in your Lordships’ House, go before the International Criminal Court, which was hitherto reserved for states which are too undemocratic to hold a fair and legal trial. That is a matter of shame.

Then there is the issue for service personnel of the deprivation of the right to profit by the discretion of the court if claiming after the expiration period is over, of which there have again been very few examples. This would adversely affect veterans who have served their country, and those veterans’ families. The provision may even breach the Armed Forces covenant, according to the Royal British Legion. There would indeed be merit in a better investigation procedure, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said, and there is certainly a case for more certainty, but that is what the Bill lacks.

Our Armed Forces deserve better. I echo Lord Guthrie, General Sir Nick Parker, the Royal British Legion and many noble and noble and gallant Lords this evening in saying that we have no justification for abandoning our respected tradition of upholding international human rights law, nor for jeopardising our reputation and that of our soldiers in the international community.