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David Davis (Goole and Pocklington) (Con)
May I start by thanking the Secretary of State? The public will not necessarily know that it is very unusual for the Secretary of State to respond to an Adjournment debate, and his presence here demonstrates how important this is and how seriously he takes the task. It also brings back fond memories for me, but that is another matter.
I hope that every Member of Parliament elected to this House believes that upholding justice should be our first priority as a Parliament. The right to life is the first among the rights we should uphold. That justice, and that right, should be even handed, and there should be no exception for agents of the state. I believe that, and accordingly I was a fierce critic of the state in, for example, the unlawful killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the torture of Binyam Mohamed, and the failure to protect and provide justice for the six Catholics who were murdered at Loughinisland in 1994. There is no general exception when the state gets it wrong. Justice must, by definition, be fair and practical, and I am afraid the findings of the Northern Ireland coroner on the Clonoe incident were neither.
To understand the significance of this inquest ruling, we must consider the context. Operation Banner was the British Army’s longest deployment, spanning from 1969 to 2007. More than 300,000 soldiers served sequentially in Northern Ireland, and despite immense challenges, the British Army performed admirably. They were not beyond reproach—Bloody Sunday is a striking example, I fear—but the massive majority of our soldiers acted with professionalism and restraint in the face of danger.
The troubles led to 3,500 deaths and 50,000 injuries. More than 90% of them were caused or brought about by paramilitaries. The British Army’s rules of engagement were clear—governed by the yellow card, which soldiers carry at all times. Soldiers were required to issue a challenge before using force, unless doing so would put them or others in immediate danger. The intent was clear: to protect innocent lives, while allowing the use of lethal force when it was necessary and reasonable. Some 1,400 members of the security forces died in those troubles. They killed approximately 300 terrorists. Those figures, and that ratio reveal the discipline and restraint of our soldiers and our policemen acting under yellow card rules. They also reflect the personal risk to the soldiers and policemen of observing those rules.
Unsurprisingly, the IRA members never carried a yellow card. They targeted civilians and committed murder without warning. Their methods ranged from torture, followed by a bullet in the back of the head, through to the mass murder of innocent civilians in atrocities such as the Omagh, Claudy and Ballykelly bombings and the utterly cold-blooded Kingsmill executions. Incidentally, the IRA was responsible for more Catholic deaths during the troubles than any other group.
The IRA members were terrorists, but we should not forget that they were also criminals specialising in organised crime. They made £5 million or £6 million a year from protection rackets, smuggling, extortion, drugs, tax fraud, state benefit fraud, fraudulent front companies, illegal gambling, theft and other crimes throughout the island of Ireland. If colleagues want evidence of that criminality, in 1990 I carried out an investigation of those activities, which was written up on 6 November of that year in the Financial Times. The point is that the IRA was both a criminal gang and a terrorist organisation. Now it is trying to rewrite history.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
First, I commend the right hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. He has been a stalwart supporter of the armed forces on every occasion in the time that I have been in this House. He has been a supporter of what is right and of justice, and he sets a standard for us all to follow. I commend him for that, and I thank him. I also thank him for working alongside my party leader, my right hon. Friend the Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), and the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) on these issues and for moving things forward with this Adjournment debate.
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the message sent through this coroner’s report is a massive overstepping of power? It will have security implications for every branch of policing and the armed forces in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and it must be struck down as not only ultra vires but factually incorrect. Those who carried out the attack on the Royal Ulster Constabulary station did so with the intent to take life, and they were rightly assessed as doing that and dealt with in an appropriate manner. This republican rewriting of the truth must end now in this Chamber.
David Davis
The hon. Member is exactly right, and he prefaces what I intend to say. He repeats the point that his party leader made in the urgent question, when he said that the judgment was ultra vires. I believe the right hon. Gentleman was right in that, although I leave that to the lawyers.
To answer the rest of the question from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), we have to return to the actual facts of the Clonoe incident. The self-styled East Tyrone brigade was one of the most active Provisional IRA units. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it undertook a surge of activity, pursuing a Maoist-style murder strategy. I think it was called Lynagh’s strategy at the time.
In August 1988, eight soldiers were killed by a Provisional IRA bomb at Ballygawley. On 7 March 1989, two Protestants were shot dead at a garage in Coagh. A former member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, Derek Ferguson, was murdered in 1991, also at Coagh. An attack against Glenanne barracks on 31 May 1991 left three soldiers dead. It is also thought that some of their members were involved in the Derryard attack in 1989, notably using a heavy machine gun, probably the DShK we will see later in this story, to kill two British soldiers.
In February 1992, the RUC special branch found out that the IRA was planning a number of attacks on 15 and 16 February. It had information that an IRA team, armed with a 12.7 mm Soviet DShK heavy machine gun and three Kalashnikov rifles, would attack the Coalisland police station. The intelligence indicated that the attack would be mounted from the Clonoe chapel car park, so the SAS commander’s plan was to arrest the terrorists as they formed up at the car park, preventing the attack on the police station altogether and seizing the heavy machine gun.
The commander did not know how many terrorists, vehicles or weapons would be involved, but it was thought that as many as 20 IRA members could be involved. The troop sergeant assessed the rather straggly hedge line adjacent to the car park to be the only suitable position where partial concealment was possible, but it notably did not provide cover from gunfire. The SAS team carried the standard Heckler & Koch G3K rifle and one soldier had a general purpose machine gun. Perhaps more notably in this context, some had shotguns loaded with alternate rounds designed to smash windscreens and deliver tear gas to immobilise the drivers and stop the vehicles. The soldiers also carried caltrops to wreck the tyres of vehicles attempting to escape. The armour-piercing rounds that the judge referred to could penetrate body armour, but their primary purpose in this context was to penetrate the engine blocks of the vehicles and stop them.
The equipment was all designed to stop escape and allow arrest—that is the key point. The plan was to close in on the IRA operatives and to arrest them as they assembled and mounted the heavy machine gun on to the vehicle in the chapel car park. At 7.40 pm on that dark February night, 12 members of the SAS were in position on the boundary of the Clonoe chapel car park, behind the hedgerow. The soldiers observed the movements of five cars in and out of the car park. They were assumed to be reconnaissance vehicles scouting out the car park for the lorry to which the DShK was to be attached.
However, the intelligence briefing was wrong—an error that ended up creating chaos and extreme danger. Instead, at around 22:40 hours, the lorry-mounted DShK was used to attack the Coalisland police station. Sixty rounds were fired at close range from the DShK and from the Kalashnikovs. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, the attackers’ intent was clear: to kill police officers. They were all would-be murderers; of that, there can be no doubt. The gunfire could clearly be heard and the tracer bullets were observed by the SAS patrol in the car park at Clonoe.
After a minute or two, the soldiers heard another burst of gunfire. The soldiers, of course, did not know that that was simply bravado. For all they and their commander knew, hiding behind their hedge, the murder gang were engaging other soldiers or other policemen. Within a minute, the lorry appeared out of the darkness, driven at breakneck speed, lurching around corners and with its engine screaming in too low a gear. As it drove into the car park, the IRA truck’s headlights illuminated the SAS position behind the hedgerow. At that point, the soldiers did not know whether they had been spotted. The soldiers then stood up, advanced on the occupants of the lorry and three other vehicles in the car park with the lorry, and opened fire. Four IRA members were shot dead, four were wounded, one of whom was arrested at the scene and, notably, given first aid by the soldiers, and others fled in cars.
Now we come forward to February 2025, when Mr Justice Michael Humphreys ruled that the use of lethal force by the SAS in this incident was unlawful. The ruling is demonstrably wrong and ignores the plain facts of the case. The SAS soldiers operated under the control of the police force, and the operation was carried out with police officers in close proximity. They faced heavily armed terrorists who had just carried out an attack on a police station—lethally, for all they knew. They did not know how many terrorists there were, but they assumed that there could be up to 20. They did not know how many vehicles there were or how many weapons were in the other cars. That creates a number of problems for issuing a challenge, which is the first option under the yellow card system. While it may be reasonable to stand up and issue a challenge to either one terrorist or a small number of terrorists who could be seen and covered while they respond, the circumstance is completely different when there is an unknown number of antagonists in an unknown number of cars with an unknown number of weapons.
The probability of one of 20, let us say, deciding to fire on the soldiers is much higher, particularly when that individual may be out of sight of the patrol. That is doubly so when one remembers that this band of killers had just attempted to murder many policemen and had returned in a high state of excitement, pumped up with adrenalin and firing their weapons in the air. Secondly, the fact that the SAS commander did not know where they all were meant that his issuing a challenge could expose his entire troop to a lethal crossfire. Remember: this was happening on a dark February night at about 10.45 pm. Issuing a challenge under those circumstances could have amounted to collective suicide. Circumstances such as that are precisely why the yellow card rules allow a soldier to fire without challenge when the danger is too great.
I find it hard to imagine a more clearcut case that allows firing without challenge, but in his ruling the judge ignored several significant facts and appears to have been naive in his view of others. His selection of facts appears to be extremely partial. For example, the judge made much of the SAS’s use of armour-piercing bullets, but he made no mention of the fact that the anti-aircraft gun the IRA was using fired armour-piercing incendiary rounds five times the size of any rifle bullets, or the fact that they could be fired at a rate of 600 to 1,200 rounds a minute. Those bullets can pierce concrete walls or shoot down aircraft at a mile range. The machine gun had just been deployed and could have eliminated the entire SAS patrol in a matter of seconds. It was a terrible weapon, and capturing it before it could be used to kill more people was an important part of the SAS tasking.
The judge accepted assertions that the IRA weapons all had their safety catches engaged. Frankly, if that were true, there was no way at all for the SAS commander or the troops to know that at the beginning of the fight. In fact, how likely was that? Let us take the DShK, which the forensic examiner said had its working parts forward, with no round in the chamber. The gun was mounted on a lorry that had just been driven back at breakneck speed from Coalisland in a few minutes. During the few minutes of that journey back, getting the gun into the state described would have required nine actions, some of which require two hands, while hanging on to the side of a lurching truck. I am afraid it all sounds just a bit improbable. The forensics specialist did not actually arrive until two hours and 45 minutes after the action, at a scene contaminated by firemen, police, soldiers and other staff—indeed, she complained about that very contamination.
Against the forensic specialist’s views, we must take the observations of soldiers on the ground and other evidence. Four soldiers reported seeing flashes from the back of the lorry, which they interpreted as muzzle flashes. We are not talking about inexperienced soldiers: they would know what they were looking at. Two soldiers heard rounds striking the ground to their right, near the hedgerow where the SAS was hiding. The forensic examiner documented bullet strike marks on the hedgerow. One soldier received a bullet wound to the face that knocked him to the ground. Without any forensic evidence, it was attributed to a ricochet, which implausibly would have required the round to go through a 180° change of direction.
Soldier G heard the exchange of gunfire and saw a soldier go down, which
“confirmed my belief that the terrorists were shooting at us”.
There was also an interview taken by the Garda, in the Republic of Ireland, of one of the IRA drivers, who said he could not understand why his colleagues had opened fire. He had been in a position in which he was able to judge where the fire was coming from and obviously believed that it was from his own side. He refused to sign the interview notes, presumably when he considered the consequences for him back home of giving away such critical data.
All of this was countered by the claim that no bullet casings were found on the ground in the car park, but a number were found in the lorry, and one of the cars present appeared to have had a general-purpose machine gun and an AKM on board. If those weapons were fired from inside a car, there would of course have been no casings on the ground in the car park. Instead, GPMG live ammunition and disintegrating links were found in that car, as well as an AKM casing from a rifle other than those recovered, implying that a fourth AKM had been fired from the car. The car had all its seats other than the driver’s laid flat, which was standard practice for the IRA when using a hatchback as a weapons platform. The car escaped and was then set on fire, and the fire services were kept away from it while it burned out—another standard IRA tactic to destroy forensic evidence. I am afraid that this ruling exposes the double standards that have plagued the legacy of the troubles.
Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is giving an important and telling speech on a very important topic. As he rightly says, these soldiers were subject to well-defined rules of engagement. He has described the IRA as a terrorist organisation, but what he has not said is that at the time, it was the most sophisticated terrorist organisation in the world. The soldiers he talks about were operating under orders, in a chain of command and on the Queen’s business, and could not respond. Does my right hon. Friend agree that there is a grotesque double standard here, and that not only is this an injustice, but the Government’s position is potentially deeply corrosive of morale, as well as deeply unjust to the veterans?
David Davis
My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. Of course, he is the Member for Hereford, so many of the people who have retired and will face these threats will be his constituents. He and I are long-standing supporters of human rights in this country, and have both defended article 2, for example, but this case is a misuse of article 2. The people who wrote the European convention on human rights were recently out of the second world war—they did not write it to be interpreted in this way. He has made a double point.
Returning to my right hon. Friend’s point about the IRA, since the events in question, the Good Friday agreement has allowed for the release of convicted terrorists in order to achieve an end to the bloodshed. I guess we all agree with that, yet we continue to persecute those who fought against the terrorists. These persecutions are conducted decades after the fact, without any new evidence being presented to give reason for the reopening of cases. After the action, everybody involved was questioned thoroughly to establish the facts—what the intelligence was, what the arrest plans were, and what happened. On the basis of that questioning, on 15 October 1992—with the evidence close to hand and the events fresh in the witnesses’ minds, and when investigation of everything was possible—the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland concluded that there should be no prosecution of the soldiers. There was no case to answer.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for bringing this debate before the House, and for the quality of his exposition. Does he agree that this case highlights the single biggest problem that we face, which is that the IRA kept no records at all, and if it did have any, it destroyed them? Many IRA members got letters of comfort from the then Government, quietly and secretly, which ended up killing any chance of prosecution. Soldiers who served have none of that; they are left out in the open, and can be prosecuted, while many IRA members have disappeared and can live a life without further charge.
David Davis
My right hon. and gallant Friend makes the central point of the argument perfectly. Here we are, 33 years later, with a Northern Ireland coroner judging events in retrospect, without any new evidence, and finding that soldiers acted unlawfully. That is entirely at odds with the result of the legal investigation immediately after the operation in 1992. I believe in a process of peace and reconciliation that allows closure for all the relatives of the dead, but he makes a good point: there are no records, and that goes for the vast majority of the people who died in the troubles. That makes this a process not of peace and reconciliation, but of vindictiveness and vengeance. It is an attempt to rewrite history, not find the truth.
There have been countless attempts to take British soldiers to court for their actions during the troubles, but how many ex-IRA combatants have faced the same thing? Not one. Not a single IRA member has been pursued over the 2,000 deaths—all murders—for which the IRA were responsible. Our veterans are being punished in their retirement years for decisions they made when serving their country. The psychological impact on them, and on soldiers serving today, is enormous. The ruling also undermines the integrity of present and future operations. We cannot send soldiers into high-risk environments, ask them to undertake brutal training, and expect them to operate with confidence if they fear being condemned decades later.
The ruling on the Clonoe incident risks further persecution of the British soldiers who served during the troubles. The Government must ensure that those who serve our country today are protected from such partisan distortions of justice. Our soldiers deserve better. What we are seeing with the Clonoe ruling is historical revisionism that seeks to punish those who served our country in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances. The law must be applied fairly, and we must not allow politics to undermine the legacy of those who fought to protect our freedoms.
The Government—I say this directly to the Secretary of State—gave notice at the time of the election that they intended to remove the element of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 that protects soldiers and police who served during the troubles from prosecution. The judgment from the Northern Ireland coroner on the Clonoe incident exposes a number of soldiers to potential prosecution. The Ministry of Defence is quite properly seeking a judicial review of this inquiry, but even if it wins, we must put in place statutory protections for our soldiers, now and in the future, from this persecution. These are men who served their country with honour, heroism and skill, sometimes in the face of the most incredible danger. They are now no doubt hoping for a well-earned peaceful retirement, not a future of endless stress and psychological torture. If the Government leave them open to persecution it will be shameful, and will serve only to further the IRA’s attempt to rewrite the history of Northern Ireland.
Many Members may have received letters on this issue from retired Special Air Service soldiers. Most of them say in those letters that they support human rights, but they do more than that; they guarantee those rights for the rest of us. Let me end by quoting the words of Charles Province, the American soldier and poet:
“It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the peace camp organiser, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier, who serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protestor to burn the flag.
It is the soldier, not the politician…who has given these freedoms.”
These soldiers are the guarantors of our security, our freedom and our justice. I say to the Secretary of State, surely we owe them no less than security, freedom and justice in return.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
As we have a little more time than expected, I want to say a few words in support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis). I served in Northern Ireland, as many others did, during the troubles. We did not ask to go there; we were sent there, and we were given real restrictions through the yellow card on how we were allowed to behave. In fact, all the soldiers with whom I served were so fearful of loosing off their rifles at any stage that they would probably have erred on the side of bringing themselves into danger, because they were so certain that they must not make a mistake.
Not a single soldier I ever met thought that this was some kind of game to be played. It was a life-and-death issue, and all those whom my right hon. Friend has described were fully aware of what was required of them under the yellow card provisions. They would not have loosed off their weapons had they not genuinely feared for their life, given the cases that had gone before, and the deaths that happened—the IRA did not give any warnings before they fired. Those issues are critical in all this, and when we sit in judgment over what happened then, all these years later, it is not justice. It becomes a pursuit by those who, as my right hon. Friend said, want to change the history.
We gave away a lot in the Good Friday agreement, and many of those who lost family members—we will all remember various individuals—had to put up with this requirement so that we could get peace. It takes a lot to get peace, and it takes a lot of suffering thereafter to find out what happened. In many cases in which soldiers served bravely and died, there are questions to be answered about the manner of their death.
I think of Robert Nairac, and I make no apology for raising his name again. He was captured by the IRA, tortured, beaten and killed. No one knows where his body lies. His parents died not knowing what happened to him. We do not know whether he had a proper burial. We certainly know that his parents are dead, but we will never find out what happened to him, and many others like him. They served their country because they believed, as my right hon. Friend said, in upholding justice and freedom.
I put it to the Secretary of State that the key to this whole debate is our duty to protect those who put their life on the line to protect our freedoms and our justice, and our duty to make sure that things are fair. If we forget about them for just one moment, we are not worthy of being here, for they do not have a voice and cannot say no when they are ordered into situations where they could die.
Only the British Army could have done what we did in Northern Ireland. We put up with so much and restrained ourselves with such dignity. I urge the Minister to listen carefully to my right hon. Friend, and to ensure justice for those who fear pursuit for only one reason: political purposes. It is time to end this.
The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Hilary Benn)
I really welcome the opportunity that the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis) has given me and the House to listen to this debate, and I welcome the opportunity to respond. I congratulate him on securing it. I listened very carefully to everything that he said. As he will know, on 11 February he asked me an urgent question about the findings of the coroner in the Clonoe inquest. In answer to that question, I told him and the House that the Ministry of Defence was considering the coroner’s findings carefully. Before turning to the outcome of those considerations, it is worth reminding the House of the facts of the case, which we have heard a lot about already.
On 16 February 1992, there was an attack on Coalisland police station by a unit of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, armed with a lot of weaponry, including a heavy machine gun. Approximately 60 rounds were fired, but thankfully no one was injured. Following its departure, and subsequent arrival at the Clonoe church car park, the unit was engaged by members of the Army’s specialist military unit, resulting in four PIRA gunmen being shot and killed. As we know, the inquest into their deaths began in 2023. On 6 February this year, the coroner found that the use of lethal force by the soldiers was unjustified, and that the operation
“was not planned and controlled in such a way as to minimise to the greatest extent possible the need for recourse to lethal force.”
I listened very carefully to what the House said when I answered the urgent question. Following careful consideration, the Ministry of Defence has written to the coroner to outline its intention of applying for a judicial review. In its view, the findings of the coroner do not properly reflect the context of the incident—I listened very carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman said about what happened—or the challenging circumstances in which members of the armed forces served in Northern Ireland. The Ministry of Defence has also confirmed that it is funding the veterans in question to seek a judicial review, and it is continuing to provide them with welfare support.
The independence of the judiciary is a fundamental democratic principle, and it is crucial to upholding the rule of law in the United Kingdom. One important element of that principle is the right to legally challenge the findings of judicial decision makers where it is believed that an error has been made, and the Government have determined on this occasion that that is indeed the most appropriate course of action. It is now important, as I think the House will recognise, given the confirmation by the Ministry of Defence that it intends to seek a judicial review of the findings of the inquest, that these proceedings are allowed to run their course.
This Government have a long-standing commitment to repeal and replace the almost universally opposed Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023. I think it is fair to say that, among the political parties in Northern Ireland, it is universally opposed. The Act has been found by the domestic courts to be unlawful in a number of respects, and we should not forget that the legislation in question made provision to grant those responsible for terrible terrorist crimes immunity from prosecution. That is what the Act did.
As part of our commitment to repeal and replace the Act, the Government are committed to proposing measures to allow inquests previously halted by that legislation to proceed. I set out this position in my written ministerial statements of 29 July and 7 October 2024 and in my oral statement to the House on 4 December 2024.
The Government recognise that the Clonoe findings have caused great concern among many of those who served in Northern Ireland during Operation Banner, and we have heard tonight from some who have given distinguished service to the armed forces and also to this House. The veterans I have met, including a group I met this afternoon, have also expressed a strong view that the way in which we collectively address the legacy of the troubles has to be fair, balanced and proportionate.
Jesse Norman
Could the Secretary of State not simply say now to the House that he has a deep understanding and awareness of the trauma that has been caused, and that he takes the side—not judicially, but politically, in his own mind as a matter of human sympathy—with the poor people affected by these decisions and how they are playing out in the public realm? Could he not say that now, so that veterans and their families understand that a Government Minister in a senior position gets it and is on their side in his own mind, even if not judicially?
Hilary Benn
I expressed that view to the veterans I met this afternoon, when I thanked them for their service in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances. The right hon. Member invites me to do that this evening, and I readily do it, because they were seeking to protect the citizens of the United Kingdom, including of Northern Ireland, in the face of terrorism and terrorists.
As the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington pointed out in his speech, the terrorists were responsible for the vast majority of deaths. However, I would add that many of them were prosecuted and convicted—paramilitaries on the republican side, and also those on the loyalist side who were also guilty of the most appalling crimes. As was pointed out, part of the price—in my view, rightly paid—to enable the Good Friday agreement to succeed and to bring the extraordinary peace and prosperity Northern Ireland has seen in the almost 27 years since, was the release of prisoners, which was really, really difficult for many families to accept, to understand and to cope with. I would also point out that, in recent years, a number of republicans have indeed been prosecuted—in fact, more republicans have been. I think I am right in saying that there has been one conviction in the last 12 years of a soldier who served there, and that was a suspended sentence.
The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) mentioned the case of Robert Nairac. The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, which does such an important job to try to reunite the remains of loved ones who were murdered by the Provisional IRA with their families—although Robert Nairac’s parents are dead, I think he has other living relatives—has made two recent attempts to find his remains, on the basis of information it has received. I am very sad to say that so far that has not proved possible, but I hope that those who have information, and who have enabled the ICLVR to find the remains of a number of people and return them to their families, will continue to provide information to that body so that it is able to recover those remains.
As the Secretary of State, it is my job to ensure that these concerns and perspectives are heard, alongside other views expressed by a range of parties who also want to see, in their own way, a resolution to the complex troubles that happened and the issues that remain outstanding. I am thinking in particular of the many families I have met since taking up the post who have said to me, “We still do not know, decades later, what happened to our loved ones who were killed.” They carry that trauma with them to this day. Therefore, the Government are absolutely committed to trying to develop legacy mechanisms that are compliant with human rights—I stand with the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington in my support, and the Government’s support, for the European convention on human rights—and that can command a degree of public confidence across communities in Northern Ireland and Great Britain.
I will just say this about the approach the previous Government took. It caused, self-evidently, immense difficulties, including numerous findings of human rights incompatibilities and therefore an erosion of trust in the Government’s ability to address these issues fairly.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
May I remind the Secretary of State that, at a hearing in 2017, the Defence Committee took evidence from four distinguished professors of law, including Philippe Sands, with whose work he is no doubt very familiar, and they made it very clear to us that in principle there was nothing illegal about having a statute of limitation, provided that it was accompanied by a truth recovery process? That met the requirement of avoiding the otherwise illegal act of giving impunity for crimes committed. The Secretary of State says that there were technical problems with the previous legislation that rendered it in some respects illegal, but will he not accept that the persecution of elderly veterans—which cannot, in the end, lead to anyone spending more than two years in prison anyway, given the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998—will continue unless and until some form of legislation is put back in place to draw a line under prosecutions and to fulfil the other part of the requirement by a truth recovery process? Whatever he thinks about the specific legislation they are repealing, will he not accept the principle that that is the only way to protect people against this form of legalistic persecution?
Hilary Benn
I would say to the right hon. Gentleman, first of all, that there were not technical problems with the legacy Act; there were many legal problems with the legacy Act. It is the Government’s position, and I think it is the position of the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington, that we uphold the European convention on human rights. I have said from the beginning that I am determined to ensure that the legacy mechanisms, in the form that they are brought before the House, are compliant with the European convention on human rights. There are plenty of examples of other people in other countries who do not abide by the European convention. In my view, it is a very important foundation of our liberties and our protection. There are legal problems with the legacy Act, not technicalities, if I may say so.
I also point out to the right hon. Gentleman that the idea of immunity from prosecution was also opposed. I have met one family of a soldier who was murdered by the IRA who were outraged by the idea that his killers should get immunity under the legislation the previous Government passed.
Sir Julian Lewis
I am very sorry, but that answer did not address the question of principle. The fact is that, unless the Secretary of State’s chum, Professor Sands, and three other equally distinguished professors of law were mistaken, there is no reason in principle—regardless of how flawed he, and the courts, even, may think the previous legislation was—that we cannot have a statute of limitation to put an end to these prosecutions, coupled with a truth recovery process. Of course, it will always be possible to find someone who wants the other lot prosecuted but not their lot, but it is the job of Government to cut through that and do the right thing, as Nelson Mandela did so effectively in South Africa.
Hilary Benn
I am not familiar with that particular bit of evidence. The right hon. Gentleman cites one group of lawyers who hold one view, but it will not surprise the House if I say that it would be possible to find another group of lawyers who hold a different view. The purpose of the courts is to adjudicate between the various arguments that are put and reach a decision, and we respect the judgments of the court. It is not possible to have a legal system or a coronial system where we get all the verdicts we like and we are guaranteed to never get verdicts we do not like. The fact is— [Interruption.] We have appealed some aspects of the judgments. The Government came into office committed to removing conditional immunity because we thought it was wrong to give terrorists immunity from prosecution for the crimes they have committed.
I would also say to the right hon. Gentleman that the truth is that the prospect of prosecutions is diminishing with each passing year. Many of the families that I have met recognise that no one is going to be held to account for what happened to their loved ones—they just want to find the answers.
David Davis
One point the Secretary of State has not yet come to is that there is an excruciating element of double jeopardy here. Every single case we are talking about was investigated carefully by the police at the time—the soldiers and the commanders involved were interrogated as to the intelligence, the plans and the outcome at the time, with all the information available. What we are seeing here is that soldiers were effectively found innocent 33 years ago, only for us to come back and do it all over again to get another answer that we want. He must understand that the soldiers see this as terrible double jeopardy.
May I bring the Secretary of State to the underlying principle of the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis)? What we are all after is a mechanism, however that is found through the law, that will allow us to release these soldiers from a lifetime sentence of being pursued by the courts under what is, in my view, frankly, a misuse of article 2. If it is true that, as my right hon. Friend says, people like Philippe Sands—hardly a hard-line right winger—think that we can do this, will the Secretary of State give the House an undertaking that he will make every effort to deliver on that aim?
Hilary Benn
I would like to give the right hon. Gentleman an assurance that when parliamentary time allows, I plan to bring forward legislation to try to find a way forward. The House will be the judge when the legislation is published. I am consulting widely on it and will continue to do so, including with veterans and others. I am not naive about the prospect of coming up with proposals that command widespread support, but I would simply observe that the last set of proposals signally failed to command support among the political parties and many people in Northern Ireland. That is why I am having to deal with the consequence of repeated findings of incompatibility, because of that legacy legislation, with the European convention on human rights.
When I last stood at the Dispatch Box to address this question, I said that we owed a great debt of attitude to those who served in Operation Banner with such distinction. I wish to repeat that statement tonight. The true legacy of those who served during that awful period is to be found in the peace that the people of Northern Ireland now enjoy. If we are being honest, the armed forces did their job.
The Good Friday agreement was itself not able to get to grips with exactly how legacy would be dealt with—those involved had enough on their plate to secure that extraordinary agreement on that miraculous Good Friday. We as elected representatives have to recognise that since the signing of the Good Friday agreement, we have not been able to agree and implement measures that effectively address the legacy of the past in a way that is balanced, proportionate, transparent, fair and equitable, and that have a chance of commanding a measure of public support. That is the objective of the Government. I will do my best to achieve it, but the House will be the judge.
Question put and agreed to.