British Jihadis (Iraq and Syria)

Bob Seely Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) for calling this debate; it is a pleasure to follow him. This is an important debate, following the appalling terror attacks in Britain in recent years. I hope that my words will be complementary to his. I wish to shed a little light on some of the difficulties faced by the military, and people in the foreign affairs and security worlds, regarding this issue. I had some knowledge of the ISIS campaign while working in the armed forces prior to my election to this place.

We are in a muddle about how to deal with British jihadis. I am very sympathetic to the Government, who are doing their best, but I feel that they have been somewhat hidebound by human rights and policing legislation, and laws from earlier Governments that make military action in some foreign states extremely difficult. The reality is that it is easier to kill a British jihadi in that state, rather than to arrest, turn or rehabilitate them. I do not mean that in either a positive or negative way; merely it is a statement of fact. My understanding is that this is down to what are known as detention pathways. These are processes that stipulate the rules and procedures to be followed when making arrests in order to do so lawfully and to respect the detainee’s human rights, whether people think they should be respected or not. This works on two levels.

First, the detention pathway in states that do not control their own territory, such as Syria and the Syrian regime, is non-existent. It is therefore incredibly problematic for the United States or UK allies in Syria to be able to make an arrest legally and without challenge, and therefore equally difficult for the UK to take possession of that prisoner. Is that person a prisoner of war, a terrorist or a criminal? It becomes even more difficult in cases involving proxy forces whose understanding of the Geneva conventions may be somewhat murkier than one would sometimes wish.

Secondly, even in allied states such as Iraq—for example, in the Kurdish territories of northern Iraq—detention pathways are still problematic because they can be challenged in or from the UK by human rights lawyers here if they think that human rights violations are taking place. We have seen some pretty appalling examples of ambulance chasing on an international scale, and I am very glad that some of those lawyers have been struck off. Those states are fragile for a reason. The rule of law and the behaviour of soldiers are not always as good as one would wish or as is almost always the case in our own standards.

The use of UK law overseas—especially the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which regulates the police in the UK—has been problematic. Please do not misunderstand me, Mr Deputy Speaker: one of the principles of ethical war is that it is legal. However, warfare that becomes too overtly legalistic and belongs more to a box-ticking culture, rather than a culture of a fundamental, natural understanding of ethical law, is not necessarily moral. I know from my modest experience that there is evidence that some of the legal hurdles that UK forces operate under make war neither more legal nor more ethical. My hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) wrote a pamphlet a couple of years ago called “The Fog of Law”, which is well worth reading.

In summary, through no fault of our own the Government have inherited a difficult position and a difficult problem with regard to the application of lethal force and UK law overseas in fragile or collapsed states. I do not have a simple answer, because it is a deeply complex problem and I saw it somewhat in action. Those laws do not always take into account local circumstance, failed states or fragile states, and are perhaps more evidence of the proof of unintended consequences.